GNU Mailman

Outgoing Queue Directory is large

Asked by dtbusse

I am new to mailman and I working with a site that uses mailman. There have been complaints that the lists are taking days to propagate out to all its members. After looking in the mailman/qfiles/out directory, I noticed a lot of files in this directory with old datestamps on them. Is this normal? Is there a way to manually run the qrunner on this directory to try and clear this out? We are using MM 2.1.4-83.27 on SLES 9 with sendmail 8.12.11. Thanks.

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Mark Sapiro
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Best Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said : 		#1

Mailman's out queue is hopelessly backlogged. If you look at Mailman's smtp log you will see entries of the form

Sep 10 08:16:24 2009 (30239) <message-id> smtp to list-name for 174 recips, completed in 3.800 seconds

You will also see that the timestamp of this entry is equal to the timestamp of the prior entry plus the processing time of this entry, and you will probably see that the rate of delivery to the MTA is much less than the 50 messages per second (with full VERP) if the entry above.

Search the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3> for "performance" for some tips.

The basic problem is that Mailman can't keep up and the cause is probably slow delivery to the MTA which in turn may be caused by the MTA doing address or domain verification on recipient addresses at RCPT time in the SMTP transaction in combination with slow DNS.

You could slice OutgoingRunner for more parallelism, but this may not help. The real solution is probably in the MTA configuration.

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dtbusse (dale-busse) said : 		#2

Ok. Thank you very much for your time.

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dtbusse (dale-busse) said : 		#3

Thanks Mark Sapiro, that solved my question.