sendmail big queue - SendMail

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On Thu, 25 Apr 2007, Tester wrote:

> Hi there,
> I have sendmail 8.13.8 running on linux fedora 6.
> How can I configure how many processes sendmail is spawning since they
> seem to take up all the memory? Also how can I deal with a 20,000
> messages queue since messages do not seem to be delivered, just get
> stuck in the queue with message from maillog:
> grew worklist for /var/spool/mqueue to 2000...12000. How can I either
> break up this spool directory into 2 of 10,000 messages each or
> increase the sendmail settings to deal with 20,000 messages?
> Thanks a lot

in your mc file try adding these and then rehashing...

define(`confMAX_QUEUE_CHILDREN',`2000')dnl
define(`confQUEUE_SORT_ORDER', `modification')dnl

** on dual xeon 3G's 2G memory we use kiddies of 2000 and sendmail
sits there still saying ' bring it on ' you could up it more, but if its
lesser spec machine, like only a single cpu P4, with at least 1G memory,
set it to 1000, of course also factor in your available bandwith, if you
only have this on isdn or dsl, drop it to 200 or 300.

The queue sort order, well I've tried 'time' and 'modification', mod..
seems to be the best, but YMMV.
Sendmail uses 'host' as the order which is not good with large queues.

However the bigger question, is how did your queue get to be THAT large in
the first place.

20K messages in a queue, I've seen that occasionally on secondary MX if
we drop the front end MTA's for maint or whatever, that takes less than
10 mins to clear out.

HOTD: Dont just apply the workaround, find and fix the root cause first.

- --

Cheers
Res

Vote for your favourite MTA at http://polls.ausics.net/v3.php
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