sendmail rejecting connection

[Fadia Almarei]

Dear All
I have the following problem when I start senmail
sendmail: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 50

I want to know the cause of the problem and how to solve it.
BR;
Fadia

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

Well, the load average is too high! When the load exceeds a certain threshold (50 in your case), sendmail stops accepting connection UNTIL the load drops below the threshold.

Find out why your load is so high!

[Kasper Haitsma]

as stated above, sendmail is rejecting because the current load average is above the accepted threshold. current LA is 50, threshold is in sendmail.cf:

O QueueLA=8
O RefuseLA=12

So to get mail going again, you should investigate, why 50 processes are waiting to get processor time, and get this number down below the thresholds. I suggest you leave the defaults alone, since changing the LA thresholds in such a way, that mail will flow again, will just add to the load, and decrease the performance even more.

HTH
Kasper Haitsma