Posts Tagged ‘server socket’

How to fix clamd “ERROR: LOCAL: Socket file /tmp/clamd.socket is in use by another process.”

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

One of the Qmail server installations I’m taking care of’s clamd antivirus process started loading the system heavily.
After a bit of log reading and investigation I’ve found the following error in my /var/log/clamd/current

@400000004dda1e1815cf03f4 ERROR: LOCAL: Socket file /tmp/clamd.socket is in use by another process.

I’ve noticed in my process list that actually I do have two processes clamd :

11608 ? Sl 0:05 /usr/local/sbin/clamd
11632 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/multilog t /var/log/clamd
16013 ? Sl 0:06 /usr/local/sbin/clamd

It appeared that for some weird reason one of the clamd process was failing to connect constantly to the clam server socket /tmp/clamd.socket and each time it tried to connect and failed to connect to the socket the system gets about 5% of extra load …

Resolving the issues was a piece of cake, all I had to do is stop the clamd server delete the /tmp/clamd.socket and relaunch the clamd server.

Here is exactly the commands I issued:

debian:~# cd /service/
debian:/service# svc -a clamd
debian:/service# svc -h clamd
debian:/service# svc -d clamd
debian:/service# rm -f /tmp/clamd.socket
debian:/service# svc -u clamd

Afterwards the clamd extra load went out and in /var/log/clamd/current I can see clamd loads fine without errors, e.g.:

Listening daemon: PID: 16013
MaxQueue set to: 150
No stats for Database check - forcing reload
Reading databases from /usr/local/share/clamav
Database correctly reloaded (966822 signatures)
SelfCheck: Database status OK.
...