Subject: RE: Zmailer problem

From: "Luke Galea" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 10:19:44 -0400

As far as I can tell.. it seems that as the queue size increases the max
files increases linearly.. so there doesn't appear to be a way I can get
zmailer to accept an infinite (or limited by disk space) queue. Is there
any way to limit the number of files the scheduler uses?

Thanks

Luke Galea 
Software Development
BlueCat Networks
905-762-5225

-----Original Message-----
From: Matti Aarnio [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: October 7, 2002 2:08 PM
To: Luke Galea
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Zmailer problem

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 01:51:38PM -0400, Luke Galea wrote:
> I am having a problem with zmailer... we had approximately 120,000
> emails queue up for sending in zmailer (anti-virus server was
accepting
> msgs too slowly).. (so I suppose they are all in the scheduler
queue)..
> All of a sudden it stopped sending any mails at all.
> 
> The server has a "max file handles limit of 8192 reached" message on
the
> console. A reboot appeared to fix the problem.. but a second reboot
was
> done and found it stopped sending again.

  You are not saying what the system is, I presume it is Linux from
  that message..

  You might need to tune your system resource settings up somewhat.

     echo 12000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

  If the situation repeats, add another about 4000 ...

> Very little is running on the server other than zmailer.. so my first
> thought was that zmailer must be using up the filehandles.. (but only
> sometimes??? Because after a reboot it worked perfectly..)..
> 
> Anyway.. now the box is not sending any mail at all and I hesitate to
> continually reboot the box until it comes up okay... 
> 
> Has anyone else experienced this before?

  Yes.  I upped the file-max, and didn't reboot...

> Luke Galea 

-- 
/Matti Aarnio	<[email-masked]>
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From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 17:02:01 +0200

Luke Galea <[email-masked]>
> any way to limit the number of files the scheduler uses?

This sounds suspiciously like a "wrong question". There may be an answer,
but the answer to the wrong question doesn't make anyone happy.

A large, unlimited queue size implies a lage, unlimited delay in mail
delivery, which is surely not desirable.

If I recall correctly, the basic problem is that you're handling mail over
to a virus checker, and the virus checker is too slow to keep up with your
mail volume. Couldn't you buy another of those and have zmailer deliver to
both in parallel? Or have zmailer deliver to your one virus checker using
two parallel SMTP streams?

--Arnt
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