Delays in queue processing?

[Julian Field]

At 12:32 04/10/2001, you wrote:
>Some of our sodd^wsplendid users have noticed that Mailscanner can
>sometimes delay mail. (they noticed a five minute delay, but not the
>hour one last week...)
>
>I suspect that what's happening is that if Mailscanner fires off a set
>of messages to a sendmail process and some of those have dodgy DNS, it
>sits around waiting for the system("sendmail...") call to return. If
>this happens to co-incide with a bit of an incoming mail-flood (Sod's
>law being what it is), things seem to go rather non-linear.
>
>Is this likely to be what's happening?

Yes it is. Well analysed. Suggest you read the Installation FAQ as it has a
section about this.
One change you might want to try (someone has done it and it worked much
better than I expected) is to add an "&" on the end of the sendmail commands.

You can do this by looking in "mta-specific.pl" for the 2 "KickMessage"
functions and adding the "&" on the end of the string passed to "system()"
in each copy of the function.

I am considering this as an option for the next version, as it seems to
work much better than I thought it would.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ