Queue control?

[Jason Ede]

From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of G. Armour Van Horn
Sent: 15 September 2007 04:14
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: Re: Queue control?

Doc Schneider wrote:

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G. Armour Van Horn wrote:



Some unspeakable person flooded Hotmail with spam that looked like it

came from me overnight, and I'm struggling under the onslaught of error

messages. Hotmail is pumping the messages in, and as long as the load

average is under 12 the system is accepting them, but for the most part

they're just piling up and not being delivered to the local user.



Earlier this afternoon there were so many files in mqueue.in that I

couldn't run ls to see how bad it was. I renamed the directory and

created a new one, and not it has over 12,000 files in it, which must

mean there are over 6,000 more messages waiting to be processed.



I don't really want to read them all, but I do want to get them

processed so I can read the valid mail that is certainly hidden in there.



I tried bumping the Max children from the default up to 20 to see if

that would force it to start delivering the mail, but that when my load

average hit 16 I stopped MailScanner. (I did "service MailScanner stop"

at a load average of just under 16, it didn't actually stop until the

load average had hit 25.) Obviously that wasn't the right approach, so

now I've set it down to 3 children which is keeping the memory use and

load average within reason, but it still isn't delivering any mail.



Is there something I can do to force the system to devote at least some

resources to working through the queue instead of just piling it higher?



Van









service MailScanner stop

service MailScanner startout (this will stop all incoming mail and will

just process mail being held in mqueue.in)



HTH



- --

- -Doc

Lincoln, NE.

http://www.genealogyforyou.com/

http://www.cairnproductions.com/


Actually, it looks to me like that just lets Sendmail process the mail being held in mqueue. The problem is, there isn't anything there. If I understand this correctly, it is MailScanner that takes the messages from mqueue.in and moves them to mqueue, which is the part that isn't happening.

I tried to modify the "start" section of /etc/init.d/MailScanner to start both the outbound Sendmail and MailScanner, but that wasn't as simple as I hoped. Right now I'm moving massive chunks of mail from the mqueue.in (and backups thereof) into mqueue, then using the "startout" option, which is working. Tedious, but it's working.

Of course, if Hotmail has another million messages for me when I start the standard MailScanner back up I don't know what I can do about it.

Van


How about keeping MailScanners number of processes low, but increasing the batch size?


We had similar problem... Managed to clear the queue by stopping incoming emails on firewall, letting MailScanner work through the queue and then opening up the firewall after I'd stripped down some of the slower spam checks temporarily.



Jason

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