On 29 Oct 2013, at 17:17, Viktor Dukhovni <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 05:01:05PM +0000, Jeremy Harris wrote:
> 
>> On 29/10/13 16:19, Osborne, Paul ([email protected]) wrote:
>>> I have checked through the manual for the version we are running 4.72
>>> (Debian - squeeze) and cannot see an option like:
>>> 
>>> smtp_queue_size_backoff
>>> 
>>> Where Exim does not respond to SMTP if there are X no of mails in its own
>>> queue waiting to be processed.
>>> 
>>> Is there such an option, if so what is it?   If there is not can I add it
>>> as a feature request? :)
>> 
>> RFEs can always be opened at http://bugs.exim.org/
>> For your immediate needs, I'd suggest putting some custom stuff onto
>> your smtp connect ACL, involving a ${run } expansion to evaluate
>> the queue size.
> 
> With a cache of the count that is updated periodically, rather than
> every time it is queried.  Scanning the queue counting messages
> can be I/O intensive.

On my machines, `ls /var/spool/exim/input |wc -l` is about an order of 
magnitude faster than `exiqgrep -c`. 

The latter takes about half a second for a queue of 1000 or so items. Of 
course, `ls` reports double the number, since there are two files for every 
queued item.

% time exiqgrep -c
1259 matches out of 1259 messages

real    0m4.625s
user    0m0.160s
sys     0m0.186s

% time ls input/ |wc -l
    3020

real    0m0.647s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m0.043s



>  You don't want to do that on every incoming
> SMTP request.  You probably also want a high/low watermark strategy
> so that once the count exceeds the high mark, the throttling
> continues until it drops below the low mark.
> 
> Such back-pressure tuning can be tricky.  The queue can be large
> in steady state with deferred mail to a destination that is down,
> while other destinations are just fine, and you may not want to
> stop accepting mail generally.  When all mail is queued for the
> same resource (e.g. waiting to be scanned), that's a more easy case
> to deal with.
> 
> -- 
>       Viktor.
> 
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-- 
Ian Eiloart
Postmaster, University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87-3148


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