Best way to measure sendmail queue depth?

[Julian Field]

On 30 Jun 2006, at 16:49, Greg Matthews wrote:

> Furnish, Trever G wrote:
>> I've been checking sendmail inbound queue depth using a simple  
>> readdir
>> and dividing the number of entries by two.  This is checked every  
>> five
>> minutes by Nagios with a 10-second timeout -- because of the  
>> timeout and
>> the frequency with which I want to do the check, I can't just use,  
>> for
>> example:
>>      mailq |head -1
>>  ...because under heavy flow conditions the mailq command takes  
>> WAY too
>> long to parse the entire set of queue files and generates too much  
>> load.
>>  I always realized dividing the number of files in the queue by  
>> two was
>> only a rough guess, but I didn't realize there could be so much
>> disparity between that number and the number of messages listed by
>> mailq.  With mailq reporting 6 messages in the inbound queue, the
>> directory actually contains 477 files!
>>  Mailq's result seems to match the count of files starting with a
>> lowercase "q".  I also have about the same number of files  
>> starting with
>> an uppercase "Q".  The rest of the files are df files, most of them
>> without any corresponding q file.
>
> I've reported a steadily growing in-queue here before and it is  
> these "orphaned" df files that are the culprit. I have made sure my  
> systems use the posix file locking as suggested but still I see a  
> steady increase in the number of orphaned data files. I use the  
> attached script to get rid of them. This script does more than just  
> check for the age of the file, it also checks whether it really is  
> orphaned. It also doesnt remove files outright, just moves them. If  
> the directory you move them to is on the same partition, this  
> operation is lightening fast (if that is important - personally, I  
> have seperate /var and /var/spool partitions).
>
> The stopping and starting of MailScanner is probably unnecessarily  
> paranoid.

You don't need to restart MailScanner after playing with the queues,  
it should be happy to run "live". But you could kill -STOP and then  
kill -CONT it if you are wary.

>
>>  Any idea what's going on?  Previously I expected to find files that
>> started with qf, df, xf, and tf (not Q), and to always have pairs of
>> files.  Obviously my expectation was pretty far off. :-)
>>  --
>> Trever
>
>
> -- 
> Greg Matthews           01491 692445
> Head of UNIX/Linux, iTSS Wallingford
>
> -- 
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>
> #!/bin/bash
> # clean up orphaned df* files in mqueue.in
> # no known cause for these files yet.
>
> /etc/init.d/MailScanner stop
>
> sleep 2
> dir="/var/spool/mqueue.in"
>
> file=`find $dir -mtime +1`
> for i in ${file}
>     do m=`basename ${i}`
>     j=${m:2}
>     if [ ! -e "${dir}/qf${j}" ]; then
> 	mv ${i} /var/tmp/
> 	fi
>     done
> echo
> df -hl
>
> /etc/init.d/MailScanner start
>
> exit 0
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-- 
Julian Field
MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk



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