[Mailman-Users] Cron Jobs

[Greg Ward]

On 14 December 2001, Ron Parker said:
> Just installed mailman.  Working.  Followed instructions for installing
> cron.  Noticed all these cron jobs running when I do ps aux.  Is this
> normal?  If not, how can I reduce the number of these things running
> (taking a lot of processor resources).  Thanks.

[...snipped ps output with lots of gate_news and qrunner jobs running
  after consuming many tens of minutes of CPU time...]

No, that most certainly is *not* normal Mailman behaviour.  Which OS,
Python version, and MTA are you using?

AFAIK, it should be safe to kill all those gate_news and qrunner
processes.  Also, if you're not using Mailman's mail-to-news gateway
feature, you don't need to run the gate_news cron job at all -- you can
just comment it out of your crontab.

However, as anyone who has read this list for more than 3 days knows,
Mailman fails completely if you don't run qrunner frequently (like every
minute).  So you can't disable that cron job.  What I would do is this:
  * disable the qrunner job temporarily
  * send a message to your test list
  * as the "mailman" user, run qrunner manually -- eg. just copy and
    paste the commented-out command line from your crontab.
    See what happens.
  * re-enable the cron job, send another message to test, and wait for
    the next minute to roll around and qrunner to run -- see what
    happens.  (Does it empty the queue and move on, or sit there
    sucking up CPU?)

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward at mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org