After a 4 month trial of Exim on the staff machines here at UBC it was
decided to replace Sendmail with Exim on the main MailServer. (2 Cpu
Ultra Sparc Enterprise 3000)
Exim 1.61 was launched on the main MailServer on Tuesday 15th April.
Apart from a few niggles concerning some addresses in various users
.forward files and in the MailingLists - the switch over was a success.
On average the MailServer is pushing 60000 messages a day totalling
387.80 MB. Of the 60000 messages received and following any expansions
the system is delivering 76000 messages to local users and 31000
messages elsewhere. At the busiest period of day the average queue
length is approximately 300 - which is better than Sendmail whose
average queue length is 500+. Exim really does push the mail out.
However last Friday (25th April) late afternoon I noticed that the queue
was in the 1000 mark. Thinking there was a network break I decided to
check the queue on Saturday morning. Too my horror the queue had
increased to over 3500 !! The logs confirmed that the network was
functioning but on monitoring the exim logs I noticed that messages were
just simply being queued. This is odd because exim has been configured
to queue if the load average of the system exceed 12 (very rare) and the
load average was only 1 !! Further investigation lead to the wait-smtp
DB being corrupted - dumpdb, fixdb & tidydb all failed with a
segmentation fault !! I am cursing myself for not keeping the core to
investigate. I removed the DBs and restarted the Exim daemon.
Gradually the queue emptied. After about 6 hours the queue was down to
its normal weekend length of 100.
Has anyone experienced this problem and if so how did they rectify it?
I am sure I have not rectified it the cleanest way. However I have now
added a tidydb command to the daily script inorder to attempt to keep
the DBs sane with a cutoff date being 7 days - as per Manual.
Wm.
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William Craven Email: William.Craven@???
University Computing Services Tel: +1-604-822-8955
University of British Columbia FAX: +1-604-822-5116
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
