[Mailman-Developers] Queue questions & thoughts...

[The Dragon De Monsyne]

On Sat, 29 Aug 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Aug 1998, The Dragon De Monsyne wrote:
> 
> > 	I just have a question.... Peering through the queueing system, I
> > note that there does not seem to be any locking of the queuefiles...
> > Correct?  The way it appears to me that mailman is working is thus:
> > 	every outgoing message is queued, then an attempt to feed it to
> > the MTA is made. After that it tries to run the queue to catch anything
> > waiting there. 
> > 	What keeps another process running the queue from grabbing &
> > delivering the queued message whilst the first proccess is trying to send
> > the same message to the MTA? Especially whence you have several proccesses
> > rapidly forked all doing delivery at once?
> 
> John will have the authoritative answer on the queueing mechanism
> (though i've messed with, and contributed some refinements to it), but
> we have seen exactly the behavior you describe, where messages are
> delivered out from under a TrySMTPDelivery process.  The solution you
> describe - a separate process, _plus_ a cron job to ensure it's always
> going - sounds a lot more cumbersome than simply using file locks, as
> you mention. 
> 

	I don't see why it would be cumbersome at all... All ye'd have
would be 1 script you would run. It would check a pid file to make sure
it's not already running, so you could run it from a cronjob to have it
automatically restarted if need be.  Sounds alot less cumbersome than all
the elaborate queueing, forking, queue-running, and now file-locking
mailman otherwise need to do. 

	-The Dragon De Monsyne