Hello,
I've got a (hopefully) simple to fix problem on my hands. I have a vanilla
qmail-1.03 LWQ installation on dual 1Ghz, 1G ram, raid5 RedHat 7.0 server
with a 10Mbis Internet connection. It is a dedicated mail server, and is
currently under no load that could suggest my problems are related to lack
of cpu/memory/hard drive resources. Aside from the sporadic probelm
described below, when things are running fine, all deliveries are made once
they get past the preprocessed queue.
Fairly frequently throughout an average day, my preprocessed queue will
begin to grow steadily and not get processed. In most cases, if this is
ignored, it resumes processing eventually. Sometimes after 15 or so minutes,
sometimes after a couple of hours, but at bad times, it can fail to clear
out the preprocessed queue for days. I've checked the logs, and in no case
is the concurrency peaked during this problem(in fact, local is usually low
at 1/120 and remote usually at about 20 to 40/120), though I'm not sure if
that would be related, anyway.
The first thing I checked, of course, is the /var/qmail/queue/lock/trigger
file, as noted in the archives. As far as I can tell, it looks correct.
Here is an example of my problem at 11:14am:
qmail-qstat output:
messages in queue: 228
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 63
trigger file at the time:
prw--w--w- 1 qmails qmail 63 Aug 6 11:14 trigger
Then, I stop and restart qmail at 11:18, after 4 minutes of the queue not
handling any preprocessing, and the preprocessed queue is promptly cleared,
as follows:
messages in queue: 159
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0
prw--w--w- 1 qmails qmail 0 Aug 6 11:18 trigger
>From there,
The only piece I note is that trigger has a file size of 63 before and 0
afterwards. Is it normal for this pipe to increase/decrease in size, or is
that normal behaviour for a pipe? Also, I've noted that when everything is
running smoothly, the date/time on the trigger stays up-to-the-minute, but
when I have problems, not only does the size of trigger increase, but the
timestamp on trigger does not update.
If I'm not on the right track here, what are the other pieces I should be
checking here, and what types of scenarios, other than a misconfigured
trigger pipe, can cause a preprocessing backlog? Of course, I should not be
resorting to stopping and restarting qmail just to get it to process the
queue. There must be some small detail I've missed. I've checked the
archives, and the only thing I can find that relates to the preprocessing
not being done is to check the trigger, but other than confirming that it is
a pipe and such, I did not see anything else to try.
Thanks in advance for any pointers,
Matt Hubbard
