Re: [EXIM] Serializing local delivery to a procmail pipe

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Author: Tabor J. Wells
Date:  
To: Philip Hazel
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [EXIM] Serializing local delivery to a procmail pipe
On Mon, Jun 21, 1999 at 12:13:34PM +0100,
Philip Hazel <ph10@???> is thought to have said:

> On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Tabor J. Wells wrote:
>
> > I've got a server that sends out mailings to a list of several hundred
> > thousand users every so often. They process bounces via procmail
> > delivering them to a separate folder. The problem is that when they send
> > out to the list, the volume of bounces is such that procmail thrashes on
> > locking the folder because exim spawns a delivery process on each bounce
> > message. So what I was wondering is if there is any way I can serialize
> > the delivery for this address, or possibly the transport that is used.
>
> I'm afraid not. If several messages arrive at once, it will run several
> deliveries in parallel. You can, of course, do your own serialization by
> making it run a script that locks something.


But that's the problem right now. Procmail is creating so many locks that
they all just thrash the system waiting on release. The volume of bounces
is such that quickly there are thousands of processes spawned which are
piped to procmail which create a lock and spin waiting for it to be
released. Is there any possibility of adding a serialize option for the
transport in a future version? Or barring that modelling something like
the smtp_accept_queue_per_connection option?

Right now I've got it set to hold the local domain, and I run an exim -Rf
out of cron every 10 minutes. That works pretty well, but there are other
legitimate users on that system that are seeing delays in delivery of
their mail by up to 10 minutes.

Tabor

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Tabor J. Wells                                             twells@???
Systems Administration Manager  Just another victim of the ambient morality
Shore.Net  --  High quality Internet access and hosting services since 1993


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