Processing large email

[Tim Sailer]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 05:15:34PM +0000, Julian Field wrote:
> At 17:02 04/02/2003, you wrote:
> >I've been using mailscanner with great success for a while, but
> >every once in a while, the mail queue seems to jam up. Investigation
> >shows that it's large emails, either attachments, or just text,
> >but 100MB+. Is there any way (running exim) to either push this
> >off to another queue, or give the large email a low priority, so
> >it doesn't get scanned until there's nothing left to do?
>
> A large email will only block up one of the child processes. The others
> will continue scanning other mail. If you run with the default 5 children,
> then you would have to have 5 huge mails turn up at *exactly* the right
> moments so as to block all 5 children.

It happens, trust me. I'm graphing mail latency, and sometimes the
latency goes up to 40+ minutes. :(

Tim

--
Tim Sailer <sailer at bnl.gov>
Application Services
Information Technology Division
Brookhaven National Laboratory  (631) 344-3001