mqueue and mqueue.in have more files than necessary ... should I worry?

[shuttlebox]

On 3/30/06, TAC Forums <tac.forums at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> We have a Sun Cobalt RaQ 550 with MailScanner/sendmail running....
>
> I just noticed that the mqueue and mqueue.in directories have more
> files than necessary ...
>
> When I run 'mailq' - it says
> ==================================
>   /var/spool/mqueue (160 requests)
> ==================================
>
>
> But when I run 'ls /var/spool/mqueue | wc' - it says
> ==================================
>   47238   47238  708570
> ==================================
>
> And when I run 'ls /var/spool/mqueue.in | wc' - it says
> ==================================
>    8360    8360  125390
> ==================================
>
> Should I worry?

Probably no reason to worry but you should take some steps anyway.
List the files and you will probably find a lot old (more than five
days) files and file names starting with a capital letter. That
indicates something went wrong, like the connection was lost or
similar. Anyway, Sendmail will not be able to do anything about it now
so you may as well delete those files to gain some speed, huge amount
of files in a single directory makes it slow.

--
/peter