On no, it's very easy: turn it off and then back on (I'm talking about users
here, not about picky sysadm getting nightmares at the idea of not shutting
down properly). And the issue is not only for servers.
> You can't. The processes you describe typically only "lives" (= eats
> memory) for a short time. They usually doesn't run for an extensive
> period of time (save sendmail and httpd) - typically just for the
> duration of the connection.
> But what happens if sendmail can't get the memory it needs? It
> aborts? It doesn't (AFAIK) eat the available memory and then hang ...
I'm sorry, but you must live in a very different world from mine.
My root processes are not limited to sendmail (and httpd is *not* running
as root, by the way). And sendmail might not be as temporary as you seem to
think (just have sendmail (or the maildelivery agent) try to access some NFS
mounted file and you'll get an idea).
On this machine of mine, `ps aux | grep "^root"' gives me 77 processes
such as syslogd, nfsd, xdm, XF86_SVGA, xterm, slogin, ...
Stefan
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