Re: ezmlm is blocking all qmail-remote process

On Friday, May 25 at 12:59 PM, quoth Oliver Welter:
> When I send out a mail to the list, it takes about 30-40 Minutes 
> until all recp are reached - it seems that during this period all 
> other mail is not send out! If I "ps" my process I see about 20 
> qmail-remote instances all busy with sending the mail to the list.

30-40 minutes? Hmm, given an average message size of 10k (estimating), 
and a list of 10,000 recipients, that means you're attempting to 
deliver around 97.6MB of data. That's a lot of data.

That's equivalent to 781.25 megabits. There are 1800 seconds in 30 
minutes, so that means your connection to the internet is giving you 
approximately 434 kilobits/second throughput, or about what your 
average cable-modem would provide. If you in fact have a faster 
connection than that, you're probably being artificially limited by 
your concurrencyremote, and you should raise it.

> Using qmHandle I can see that the number of messages in the remote 
> queue increases every minute and it seems that none of the queued 
> messages can gather a qmail-remote process to get send.

Yup; qmail's busy pushing 97MB through your pipes.

> Is there a trick to limit a ezmlm list to leave a certain amount of 
> instances left for normal mails?

That's a qmail question, not an ezmlm question.

The answer is both yes and no.

No, there is no way to tell qmail that certain applications' emails 
have priority over others or should be limited in some way.

Yes, there is a solution to your problem that doesn't involve buying a 
better connection to the internet.

The way to do it is with two different qmail installations: one 
specifically for ezmlm, and one for everything else. You can convince 
ezmlm to use the alternate qmail (e.g. by wrapping ezmlm-send in a 
wrapper that sets the QMAILQUEUE environment variable to the alternate 
qmail-queue binary) and leave the existing qmail installation in 
place. Then you can configure your limits independently: the 
ezmlm-specific qmail installation's deliveries will not limit (except 
in that it's using bandwidth) the "normal email" deliveries. You MAY 
run into problems if your machine is severely resource constrained 
(i.e. running out of RAM), but if you have a sensible amount of RAM, 
that shouldn't be a problem.

~Kyle
-- 
Strong coffee, much strong coffee, is what awakens me. Coffee gives me 
warmth, waking, an unusual force and a pain that is not without very 
great pleasure.
                                                  -- Napoleon Bonaparte

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