sendmail rejecting messages

[Zathros]

Hello,

this morning we suddenly were not able to send and receive mail. The sendmail process reads as follows:

root 6502 1 0 10:51:21 ? 00:00:01 sendmail: rejecting connections on daemon Daemon0: load average: 45

What little research I've been able to do hasn't led to an answer. I've stopped and started the service. The filesystems are not full and I've not found any other reasons that this would happen.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[jkupski]

Something is SERIOUSLY overloading that system... I'm amazed you can get a response out of the console if the load average is really 45.

Suggest you run top and find out what processes are consuming so much of your system resources.

 

[Zathros]

ok, I don't know what top is, and man top does retune some a prgram but /usr/lib/mail/top does not exist.

I did some process searches and found one user had about 20 popper processes running and I killed those. Now the load is down to 14. I'll keep looking. I guess I might try a reboot.

It's only been a year since I've rebooted though.