Re: tlug: tlug server latency

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

On Mon, Oct 05, 1998 at 03:33:26PM +0900, Jim Schweizer wrote:
> 
> On 03-Oct-98 Scott Stone wrote:
> > 
> > Entries such as this one: <snip>
> > figure prominently in 'mailq -v' on the server. 
> 
> OK, this sent me running for 'The Bat Book'  :) 

As much as I've grown to dislike sendmail, I've got to admit they have
the coolest O'Reilly animal.  I forget who has the sloth, though (that'd
be my runner up).

Maybe the upcoming qmail book should have garlic or something on the
cover.  Were any of Bat-Man's arch enemies named after an animal besides
The Penguin?

>                                                 As I understand it (and my
> knowledge of sendmail is limited) mail is queued only for those
> recipients to whom delivery is not immediately possible, but if the s
> configuration option is set to true, all mail messages are queued. 
> 
> So, correct me if I'm wrong, if we set s to false wouldn't the message
> going to remora.co.jp be the only one queued (and any others that are
> undeliverable) allowing the majority of list to be sent?
> 
> I guess I need to study some more. How does majordomo effect the
> queue?

I'm not sure what the "s" option actually does in sendmail (my bat book
is at home) but I doubt it will have any beneficial effect here.  Only
messages to remora.co.jp are being deferred, and I suspect that
majordomo invokes sendmail separately for each recipient on the list
rather than once for all envelope recipients.  At least I hope so.

Sendmail operates on a "send it if you can, queue it if you can't"
strategy, and so any messages found in the queue weren't sent
immediately for some reason.  Qmail, by way of comparison, queues
*everything* and has processes that add entries to the queue
(qmail-inject and qmail-smtp) as well as a *separate* process to drain
the queue (qmail-send).  In my opinion, this tends to work faster and
more reliably -- or at the very least more deterministically.

Regardless, 30 to 90 minutes to work through the list doesn't make sense
just because an MX lookup failed -- the DNS timeout isn't THAT long.  

Hmm ... how often is sendmail configured to do a queue run on the tlug
server (what follows the -bq option)?  I've never seen less than 30
minute deliveries -- maybe if any recipient is deferred the entire thing
is put in the queue and awaits the next "batch run"?  If -bq is set to
30m then I'm worried.  Blech!!!!

I'd be happy to look into it, but if I can't figure it out in short
order I'm likely to push to convert everything over to qmail and ezmlm!
(Note that ezmlm can be made to look pretty close to majordomo,
accepting the same commands, etc.)

Regards,
-- 
Rex
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