Mail slow to send

[Shahril M]

Hi folks,

In my UAT environment, in which one single-CPU HPUX box is used to run several applications such that the load stands between 25 and 30, my mail remains in the queue until I terminate the applications at end of each testing day.

How can I momentarily push the sendmail up the order so my mail can go out?


TIA,
Shahril

[Steven E. Protter]

With glance or the command line you can decreas the NICE setting for the sendmail daemon. That will give it higher priority.

You can do things like this with PRM but it will do you no good on this box. It can't run PRM if its running that hot.

I doubt giving sendmail a higher priority will help with a system that is this overloaded.

I would get another box for mail and mail only. You could spend less than $1,000 for an old server and get a great email box. Or you can do Linux on an old PC and take this task somewhere else.

I think you are simply pushing this box too hard, asking too much of it.

SEP

[Shahril M]

Hi Steven,

Thanx for your reply.

I grep'd the sendmail process and it returned the flwg:
root 895 1 0 Feb 28 ? 0:04 sendmail: rejecting connections on port 25: load average: 24

Does this mean that "un-nice'ing" this process will DEFINITELY not help the situation? If so, are there any other alternatives like restarting the sendmail with certain options?

Just for your info, I am not running mail here, just trying to send a mail out to report error logs of the applications. According to top, it is hot mainly due to the iPlanet web service and several java applications. Nevertheless, there are no performance issues on these applications though.


Rgds,
Shahril

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Shahril,

Sendmail has defaults that will stop it processing it's queues at a load avg of 8 & accepting connections at 12.
Search sendmail.cf file for "Load" or "Queue" to find these & if you can't lower the load avg on this server you'll need to increase these settings to process mail - period.

HTH,
Jeff

[Shahril M]

Hi Jeff,

Thanx for your reply.

Am I right to say that Queue-Only Load Average (option QueueLA) is for sending, while Refuse-Connections Load Average (option RefuseLA) is for receiving?

So:
# load average at which we just queue messages
#O QueueLA=8

# load average at which we refuse connections
#O RefuseLA=12

I just change the values to say, 30, and uncomment the 2 lines?

Also, how do I restart the daemon?


Rgds,
Shahril

[Steven E. Protter]

No, changing nice might help.

Your system load factor is pretty high and thats a good case for faster hardware or splitting the work.

There comes a point with all systems that changine nice can't help. Your load factor may fit that situation.

Give it a try.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

After making Jeff's changes:

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

It is actually a better idea than messing with nice.

SEP