[vox] What happens internally to Linux when it is in password limbo?

["Danny Webster" <dpwMAPSebster@basiclabinc.com>]

    The sendmail on a 200MHz recently slowed to a crawl on a Red Hat 6.1
system.  Authorization took up to 3 minutes on machines running Outlook
Express.  The day after I changed the root password from an easily guessable
password, the machine had all the speed you could hope for.  But since I
have not yet restarted any of the services or rebooted, the old password
still works even though through linuxconf the password has been changed.
Does this make any sense to anyone?  There is nothing too suspicious in the
access logs, mainly just some failed anonymous FTP access.  Running top used
to show less than 1k of memory free and around 56 processes sleeping, 1
running.  This is what it shows now:

 10:57am  up 4 days,  2:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
57 processes: 56 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% system,  0.0% nice,  3.0% idle
Mem:   63124K av,  57252K used,   5872K free,  35124K shrd,  18276K buff
Swap: 157208K av,      0K used, 157208K free                 22416K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
10697 dpwebste  18   0  1020 1020   816 R       0  4.7  1.6   0:00 top
    1 root       0   0   460  460   388 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:03 init
    2 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:00 kflushd
    3 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:00 kupdate
    4 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:00 kpiod
    5 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW      0  0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd
    6 root     -20 -20     0    0     0 SW<     0  0.0  0.0   0:00
mdrecoveryd
   99 root       0   0    44   44    20 S       0  0.0  0.0   0:00 mingetty
  358 bin        0   0   476  476   388 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:00 portmap
  374 root       0   0   464  464   396 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:00 apmd
  427 root       0   0   528  528   428 S       0  0.0  0.8   0:03 syslogd
  438 root       0   0   752  752   388 S       0  0.0  1.1   0:00 klogd
  454 daemon     0   0   484  484   404 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:00 atd
  470 root       0   0   600  600   504 S       0  0.0  0.9   0:00 crond
  490 root       0   0   484  484   408 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:00 inetd
  506 root       0   0   488  488   408 S       0  0.0  0.7   0:00 lpd

    I would be curious to hear from anyone with theories, or if you could
recommend a book that goes into great depth into the innerworkings of Linux
I would appreciate it.

Danny

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