> > Most likely it is so that sendmail can determine the load average. > > This is not necessary on Linux (which the original poster mentioned), > which has a world-readable /proc/loadavg pseudofile. I thought it would go without saying, but I suppose I should have stated that there are 18 million different systems and ways of determining the load average. Not all of them could be coded into sendmail. So the statement should really read "on systems which lack a convenient method of getting the load average, or which Eric simply hasn't had time to code into sendmail, it is necessary to read /dev/kmem to determine the load average" :-) --Greg