bottlenecking?

[Jim Levie]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 11:01, Julian Field wrote:
> Next time it happens, any chance you could tar up the incoming dir and the
> mqueue.in dir (the incoming dir is the most useful), and take a look at it
> off-line some time, to see if there is anything odd in there?

I guess i didn't make it clear... Yes I've examined the contents of
mqueue.in (especially those messages in the batch in process) and I
don't see anything remarkable. Furthermore, a simple restart takes up
where the previous instance failed and those messages already in MS's
work dir are processed. In an attempt to duplicate the problem in a more
controlled environment I've copied the mqueue.in contents to my test jig
and run MS against the entire queue dir as well as using my queue feeder
at various rates. So far I haven't managed to duplicate the problem on
the test rig.
>
> Also, a "ps -fel" or "ps auxww" at the time when it is stuck, just saved to
> a file, would be useful as that might tell us what process is actually
> hanging up (it might be the virus scanner, it might be MailScanner, it
> might be the TNEF decoder, all sorts of things).
>
I have looked the process list, thinking that it might be the virus
scanner, but that process wasn't in the list. I'm using Sophos, so I
don't need the TNEF decoder (though I have seen it cause problems on
installations that required it). When I've used the external TNEF
encoder and it causes a hang the only solution that has worked is to
take the offending message out of the work queue. At least when that
process is the cause the behaviour is completely repeatable.

The last two times that I caught this while it was happening I could see
the mailscanner process growing in size (apparently without bound) and
consuming a lot of CPU. Sort of like it was in some sort of endless
loop. What I didn't do, and will if it happens again, is to look at what
files the mailscanner process had open and if any of those were
changing.
--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
   Jim Levie                                 email:
jim at entrophy-free.net