What is sendfile_vn_rele_daemon process?

[HFrazier]

Curious as to what the sendfile_vn_rele_daemon process is and can't seem to find any information on it.  

[Duncan Edmonstone]

If you look at the Parent Process ID for sendfile_vn_rele_daemon you will see it is 0 - this indicates that the process is a kernel daemon - i.e. not something you should have to worry about - it needs to be there and you can't do anything about it. As to what it does - well that isn't publicly documented anywhere I can find, but I expect it performs some function associated with the sendfile() system call. I seem to recall using sendfile could cause problems on some systems under filecache pressure as virtual memory pages used by sendfile couldn't be paged out... maybe this daemon is part of the fix for that? Honestly I don't know though and it's not something you should be concerned about - if you look at a ps output you will see a bunch of other processes with PPID of 0 and these are also kernel daemons that you can just ignore.

"Pay no attention to the man benhind the curtain"

[HFrazier]

Thank you Duncan.  I'm not concerned about the process but we had some DNS issues that broke communication with the SMTP server.  I was just looking at any processes with the name sendmail in them and have wondered about this one.  I couldn't find anything about so it so thought I might ask.  

Regards, Heather

[Dennis Handly]

> with the name sendmail in them

sendmail won't be a kernel demon.