SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

Date:	Tue, 30 Mar 2004 12:56:34 PST8PDT,4,1,0,3600,10,-1,0,7200,3600
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: SCOUG Server - several restarts, might have an answer

Content Type: text/plain

Randell has been very helpful the past couple of days in watching
INetMail and restarting it when necessary. Together, he and I have had
to restart INetMail about five times.

I just spent more than my daily hour trying to figure out what might
be going on, and here's the story:

-- 1. INetMail has a queue\ directory where it stores outgoing messages
that haven't been sent yet.

-- 2. Somebody signed up with a bad email address. The address they
used was k****@nospamdslextreme.com (the *'s are mine) which is
obviously not deliverable.

-- 3. INetMail doesn't use a database to figure out what message should
be sent next. Instead, it simply marches through the entire queue\
directory looking at each message and seeing if it's time to try to
deliver it again.

-- 4. INetMail is multithreaded.

-- 5. The SCOUG-Help list has been very active the past couple of days,
and there's still plenty of incoming spam.

-- 6. THEREFORE: INetMail finds a whole bunch of different messages in
its queue for k****@nospamdslextreme.com and starts a whole bunch of
threads to deliver them and each of those threads is doing message
processing, thus the cpu meter pegs at 100%. And this goes on forever
because by the time the last message in the queue\ directory is
processed more than 5 minutes has elapsed and it's time to start at the
beginning again.

-- 7. So what I just did is review "a whole bunch" of the queued
messages, noticed that "a whole bunch" of them were for
k****@nospamdslextreme.com, then went to the scoug-programming list and
deleted that address. As the pending messages in queue\ are deleted
after they time out, the queue should get a lot smaller and INetMail
will hopefully not "lock up" as much.

-- 8. This won't solve the looping problem where a message keeps being
returned to itself. That's a different problem.

-- 9. There isn't any report available from INetMail/Steward showing
which addresses could not be sent to. Such a report would be very
helpful.

- Peter

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