On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Brett Thorson wrote:
> Going to save you the spam of my eximwhat report, and try to summarize it
> here. This is still pretty confusing. Here are the details for the config I
> tried today:
>
> trusted_users = exim : majordomo
> delay_warning = 0s
> deliver_queue_load_max = 20
> ignore_bounce_errors_after = 0s
> return_size_limit = 10000
> queue_only_load = 3
> queue_run_max = 2
> smtp_accept_queue = 10
> strip_trailing_dot
> remote_max_parallel = 10
> queue_smtp_domains = *
>
> 100 Messages came in at 7:45AM. Each one of them started going through the
> routing process. They came upon the queue_smtp_domains so no mail was sent
> out. This is what I expected.
>
> After that completed, I think the deliveries started up. So I ran eximwhat,
> and I see 183 exim tasks running.
>
> exiwhat | grep "waiting for a remote delivery subprocess to finish" | wc -l
> 89
> (Below is exim delivering messages to e-mail addresses)
> exiwhat | grep "delivering" | grep "\-00 to " | wc -l
> 89
>
> -------------------------------
> So what I am trying to figure out is shouldn't I have at most 20 outbound
> connections? Or does exim try to deliver one message, look in the database
> for other messages that need to get delivered there, and it tries to pick up
> that message? I think that is what is happeneing, but since I keep hearing
> "exim has no central queue manager" I can't figure out which one of my
> thoughts is wrong.
If all is as it should be, there should be at most two queue runner
processes, each of which should be running one delivery process, each of
which should run up to 10 subprocesses, so yes, up to 20 connections.
How many recipients are there for each of the 100 messages? I assume
from what you've said that they have more than one recipient (otherwise
you'd only get 2 connections). If Exim makes a delivery to one host and
there are other messages routed to the same host, because of
queue_smtp_domains, it will pass the connection on to a new process to
send another message on the same connection, and the original process
will continue making connections for its own recipients.
However, (again assuming it all works as it is supposed to), the queue
runner process that started the original process will not move on to a
new message until the entire chain of messages sparked off by the
original has completed. This is precisely to avoid firing up too many
processes.
Nevertheless:
The new process should only do the deliver down the channel it has been
passed, which means that the number of connections should increase by 1,
but if there are lots of different recipients in the original message,
and each one sparks off a new process for other messages, yes, I guess
this is a way that a substantial number of extra processes could be
created.
Have you tried with queue_domains instead of queue_smtp_domains?
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
