Folks,
I had been using the BIND and sendmail provided by DEC until
recently. About a month ago, I installed bind. No problems.
A week ago, I installed sendmail 8.9.1a. The performance has
been atrocious. Each mail message takes a ridiulous amount of
time to be delivered. Here is an example of the sending of a
verbose mail message to myself:
% /bin/time Mail -s "test" -v rrodrigu < /dev/null
Null message body; hope that's ok
rrodrigu... aliased to rrodrigu_at_ssc.wisc.edu
rrodrigu... Connecting to local...
rrodrigu... Sent
real 328.7
user 1.1
sys 2.1
Before switching to 8.9.1a, this took just a few seconds. Now,
it is taking in excess of five minutes. Sending to a mailing list
is even worse. Here is the verbose output from sending to a
majordomo test mailing list that contains two names:
% /bin/time Mail -s "test email -- please ignore" -v ralph2 < /dev/null
Null message body; hope that's ok
ralph2... aliased to "|/usr/local/bin/wrapper resend -l ralph2 -h
ssc.wisc.edu -f ralph2-owner -I ralph2.senders -p bulk -s ralph2-outgoing"
"|/usr/local/bin/wrapper resend -l ralph2 -h ssc.wisc.edu -f ralph2-owner
-I ralph2.senders -p bulk -s ralph2-outgoing"... Connecting to prog...
"|/usr/local/bin/wrapper resend -l ralph2 -h ssc.wisc.edu -f ralph2-owner
-I ralph2.senders -p bulk -s ralph2-outgoing"... Sent
"|/usr/local/bin/wrapper resend -l ralph2 -h ssc.wisc.edu -f ralph2-owner
-I ralph2.senders -p bulk -s ralph2-outgoing"... Sent
real 740.5
user 2.8
sys 5.0
With jobs running this slowly, my system has been running many
simultaneous sendmail jobs; it has run out of swap space,
although with 96 MB RAM and over 400 MB swap, this seems unlikely
on a system with moderate amounts of email; and it ran out of
processes at another point, something I have not seen on this
system.
Also, it appears that ypserv is running constantly, taking as
much CPU time as it can (although few processes take up much
time).
I looked through the sendmail.org web pages and saw nothing
particularly interesting. I also searched the archives for this
mailing list, which suggested placing certain flags in makefiles
for the build of sendmail, which I did.
As a temporary workaround, I started sendmail as daemon and as
queue manager separately, allowing me to use the startup option:
/usr/sbin/sendmail -q15m -OMaxQueueRunSize=10
This workaround has prevented the system from getting overloaded,
but, of course, the result is that some mail messages are taking
hours to be delivered.
Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions?
Ralph Rodriguez rrodrigu_at_ssc.wisc.edu
UNIX System Administrator (608) 263-5204
Social Science Computer Cooperative Office hrs: Wed 1-2pm
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Received on Mon Nov 16 1998 - 22:33:33 NZDT