In our normal day-to-day we have maybe 2,500 messages in the exim queue at any time. We retry delivery every 15 minutes, slowing down the retry as messages gets older.
Had a bit of a routing issue, where Exim was accepting mail but could not deliver to the next server (not a mailbox). The queue grew on one server to just over 200,000 messages ( 14 GIGS worth! ). We stopped sending new mail to the server, so it could deal with what it had. I assumed it would blast through those messages very quick. It didn't move quick, it seemed to crawl. Doing a tail -f command on the log I could easily read the log it was moving so slow. I ended up opening a bunch of SSH connections, picking a domain and doing something like this: for eximid in `exiqgrep -i -r @example.com`; do exim -m $eximid; done; That got a higher number of messages processing, still with no load on the server. When the queue got down to maybe 90,000 messages I found the speed that Exim was processing seemed to be increasing, started to time and see how many messages it was doing per minute. At 85,300 messages in the queue it did about 480 deliveries per minute. At 67,775 messages in the queue it did about 785 deliveries per minute. At 40,458 messages in the queue it did about 1,227 deliveries per minute. I have read on here that Exim does not do well with a large queue, is my observation normal? The bigger the queue the slower the processing? How could I have handled that massive amount of mail automatically, I want to see those messages flying! Is there a way to configure Exim to stop accepting mail if there is so much in the queue? Maybe if there is 75,000 message in the queue we just refuse to accept anymore because there is obviously a problem and adding more to the queue is just going to make things worse. -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
