from http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52750 saslauthd memory leak > fix This is an old issue that still isn't resolved on debian & derivates ( others ? ) maybe someone should include it in the howtos. issue: saslauthd's memory usage starts to climb handling invalid authentication requests, eventually eating all your server memory ( & swap ). this is in fact a very serious issue, as it facilitates (D)DOS attacks by someone sending lots of crap auth. requests until the OOM process killer kicks in. there's an easy workaround by changing /etc/default/saslauthd Code: OPTIONS="-c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r" to Code: OPTIONS="-n 0 -c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r" adding "-n 0" effectively prevents the saslauthd daemon from using thread processes by using forks instead. ( on 1 of my servers it used up 8GB and 16GB swap.... which was freed up instantaneously upon changing the config and invoking /etc/init.d/saslauthd restart ) if anybody has a better solution.. feel free to post