Re: [exim] Spool file is locked (another process is handling…

On Wed, April 11, 2012 10:39 pm, Phil Pennock wrote:
> On 2012-04-11 at 13:26 -0700, Yan Seiner wrote:
>> 2012-04-11 13:22:16 1SI3wt-0006jb-DK Spool file is locked (another
>> process
>> is handling this message)
>
> Run "exiwhat", it will tell you which Exim processes exist, what they're
> currently doing, etc.
>
> Usually this message just means that there's a slow remote host, an Exim
> from another queue runner is already trying to deliver the mail, and so
> this queue-runner is skipping that message and going onto the next one
> in the queue. As such, it's harmless. As long as that is what's
> happening.
>
> A diagnostic log message like this just says "I'm not handling it
> myself, because ...", not "there's a problem to be fixed". Now, if it
> persists on the same message for a while, you might look into what's
> happening with that particular message. Perhaps the recipient system
> is doing something icky, such as passing your connections to a tarpit
> system.

Seems to be a TLS entropy issue? (I'm guessing here but from reading what
I've been able to it looks similar.)

Yesterday the messages were persisting for hours, and there was upwards of
100 stalled at a time.

Not sure what I can do to help the entropy issue. It may just be that
I've had a huge rsync job running for days and if it's using the same pool
it could be draining all the entropy faster than the system can generate
it. I don't know enough about how entropy works to make more than guesses
from googling....


--
On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into
the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not
able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage, Inventor of the computer, 1864