Re: [exim] [NEWBIE] Confused

Hi exim@???, on Thu, 2 Sep 2004 13:11:33 -0500 you wrote:

[ starting queue runners in Exim - cron or daemon? ]

> Thanks for the prompt response.

OK. Please don't reply offlist in general. Thanks. Also, it would greatly
ease replying to you, increase the value of this discussion in the list
archives for people to refer to, and encourage more people to reply to you
if you quote correctly and in context (this means NOT leaving the entire
of my original mail in and writing your reponse at the top, because this
doesn't make sense. Backwards write not do we English In. Look at how I
have written this mail.)

> 1. The cron job starts exim as a daemon (i.e. with the -q option. That
> clearly cannot be correct. Right?

No, I think I may have confused things. The "-bd" option is used to start
Exim as a daemon. If you run it as a daemon, you can make the queue runs
happen automatically by adding the -q option. So, for example, if you want
to run Exim as a daemon and do queue runs every 10 minutes, you would
start it with this:

exim -bd -q10m

Now, if you run Exim with the "-q" option on its own (as the cron script
you showed did), that just starts a queue runner.

> 2. If the exim processes should exit, once they've checked the queue,
> any intelligent guesses why that's not happening?

You have a very large queue? If not, I'm not sure.

> 3. Does queue_run_max take a value,

Yes. See the comprehensive Exim documentation.

> and, if so, what would be a good default value for queue_run_max?

Depends how large your queues are and what resources you have!

> How do I know that the value I've chosen is too low?

If your machine is getting overloaded, basically. Setting it too low is
not going actually hurt anything; it's just going to slow down mail
delivery.

If you regularly have very large queues, make sure that they are not full
of bounces (this is quite a common problem). If they are, you need to
address the core problem of why you have lots of bounces to deliver.


Tim