What kind of machine are you running that on? (hardware & software)
How much system/processor load are you at normally?
If you are running anything else on the machine?
I don't know which OS you run, but you may be able to up the amount of fd's
open. Try running 'lsof' (if you have it) to see which programs have the
most open fd's..
----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Ward" <gward@???>
To: <exim-users@???>
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 11:09 AM
Subject: [Exim] Reducing number of Exim processes
> Hi all --
>
> I've tried everything I can think of to reduce the number of Exim
> processes running simultaneously on our server in peak load periods, but
> we still sometimes run out of processes on our server -- ie. can't fork
> anymore.
>
> There's really only one such peak for us: when someone approves a post
> for a moderated discussion list that we run. It has 1981 subscribers,
> 1162 of them non-digest; it is run by Mailman, with SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 20.
>
> Thus, when a single post is approved, Mailman opens 1162/20 = 58 SMTP
> sessions to Exim on localhost, and sends the same message with 20
> recipients down each connection. There are 736 unique domains in the
> 1162 non-digest subscribers, so Exim has a fair amount of work to do to
> get all those messages out the door. In order to avoid problems with
> crazy load averages, running out of filehandles, and running out of
> process space, I've enabled the following Exim options:
>
> deliver_queue_load_max = 20.0
> queue_only_load = 20.0
>
> In order to keep the queue moving along at a good clip, I increased the
> frequency of queue runs to every 2 minutes. To allow lots of parallel
> queue runners once the initial peak in load average is past, I also set
> these options:
>
> queue_run_max = 20
> remote_max_parallel = 20
>
> This all works fairly well, but there are still problems with running
> out of process space. In particular, this morning I approved a single
> message, and shortly there after got this in /var/log/mail.log:
>
> Jul 18 11:46:36 kronos spamd[3495]: connection from localhost [
127.0.0.1 ] at port 43612
> Jul 18 11:46:36 kronos spamd[3495]: cannot fork: Resource temporarily
unavailable
>
> ... ie. SpamAssassin's spamd was unable to process a message (a bounce
> resulting from the list posting, as it happens) because it couldn't
> fork.
>
> Anyone have any ideas how to reduce the number of Exim processes so that
> other programs still have room to fork, while keeping the queue running
> fast enough that it doesn't take several hours to completely deliver
> each list posting?
>
> Greg
> --
> Greg Ward - software developer gward@???
> MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org
>
> --
>
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details at
http://www.exim.org/ ##
>
>
