> Sorry, I had to take off yesterday.
it's alright, I stayed up all night waiting for you to respond. vbg
>DNS has been OK and we have not made any changes to it in a few
>weeks. Looking at things this morning, I only have 1 SMTP open in
>the task manager. However the past two days there were about 10 to
>15 open and doing nothing.
That's what could be "orphaned SMTP- processes". Each SMTP process
has, in turn, picked up the sick msg in the queue, the SMTP process
hangs, BUT the msg appears available for sending. No other msgs can
leave because this sickie is at the top of the queue and apparently
available to be sent, so SMTPD spawns a new SMTP- process that hangs,
etc, etc. None of this may be happpening, but it's plausible.
>They would still be open after around 15 minutes and the spool
>directory was swamped.
ok, queue build up due one sick msg hanging most/all SMTP- procesesses.
>Don't know what is going on. Seems to be working fine, not any
>errors other than a few usual MX Failures in the logs, everything
>just is really slow compared to what it used to be.
yep, the hung SMTP processes do not write errors to the log
file. only symptoms are a bunch of SMTP processes doing nothing and
no or very little mail departing. Some mail leaves because the odd
SMTP process happens to pick up a healthy msg rather than the sick
msg and sends ok.
I wonder if you turned on SMTP debugging whetehr you could see which
msg file is the culprit?
You'd have to do this after rebooting in order to mass kill the SMTP
processes, or the NT reskit's "KILL pid" to kill each one manually by
pid number. With debugging on, I think the msg file name is logged,
so with 10 SMTP- orphans, you'd have the same sick msg in the log 10 times.
You could copy all mail to spool\save to get the sick msg out of the
queue directory and so ensuing mail could leave immediately. Then
copy back the \save files in bunches until the sick msg is copied
back. not fun with 100's or 1000's of msgs.
The SMTP client process needs to be "hardened" against dying from bad
msgs, easier said that done I suppose.
Len
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