Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote: > On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 16:47 +0100, Philip Hazel wrote: > >>On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Warren Baker wrote: >> >> >>>Besides the downside of using it in conjunction with queue_run_in_order, >>>surely the majority of installations out there make use of >> >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> >>>split_spool_directory - so should it not be enabled by default since it >> >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> >>Have you any evidence for this? My (also totally unsubstantiated) guess >>would be that "the majority of installations" are single-user or >>small-company users of Debian boxes. I think we just don't know. > > > speaking only for our own installation, we only enable it for the > outbound queue. the other Exim instances (which outnumber it by 30 to > 1) use a regular queue. I prefer to know in exactly which directory I > should look for the queue files. it makes our test for old messages in > the queue a lot simpler, for instance. > > actually, I think that if you have a long queue, you're doing something > wrong. as I write this, our single outbound queue has 164 messages. > clearly the number will scale with your number of users, but we have > more than 60000 users, and I doubt "the majority of installations" have > more than that. >
I think you've nailed the core of the issue. On a 'healthy' POSIX-based system, a single queue should never outrun available filenames at one level. On a problematic system, (think massive frozen message count), and/or if on a fs that has lower limits for per-level filename capability (WinWoes?, OS/2?, or?...), then split-spool might at least buy some time to spot the problem and seek a fix before resoeuces were overcome. Otherwise, neither the extra CPU cycles to sort where in the 'split' tree to store/recover, nor the time needed by the fs drivers will usually matter. A typical machine will ordinarily be resource limited by a scanner, or absent that, probably bandwidth/connection-count bound well before it becomes queueing system bound. Which may be why we have no 'one-size fits all' answers? Bill -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
