[Mailman-Users] Still want it faster :-)

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002 03:07:42 +0200 
Danny Terweij <danny at terweij.nl> wrote:
> From: "J C Lawrence" <claw at kanga.nu>

>> You're not having a qrunner problem, but an MTA and DNS lookup
>> problem.

> My question is, what are the technical details of qrunner?

Not much really, for the bit you're interested in it iterates across the
qfiles directory taking each message in turn and processing/delivering
it appropriately.  There's little magic or mystery there -- look at the
source -- its quite trivial.

> Then i maybe got the working of qrunner. Now i do not see any clue why
> MTA/DNS is related to picking up a message from the qfiles dir.

Sure -- again, read the FAQ, and read the archives of this list.

The basic story is that sendmail (which I recommend you move away from)
is not accepting each address handed to it on a RCPT TO until it has
done a DNS verify against the domain.  This is slow.  It is especially
slow if you don't have a local cacheing name server.  Even if you do it
is slow.  If name resolution is broken or poorly set up on your machine
it can take up to 2 minutes per address just to attempt the name
resolution.

Summary: Install a cacheing name server and configure your MTA to not do
DNS verifies on RCPT TOs.  This is covered clearly and in great detail
in the FAQ.

> My vision on qrunner : Heyyy i have got a new file in the qfile
> dir. lets doing something with it.  When finished that mail.. lets
> check if there is another.. yeah i found another one.. lets do
> something with it... lets see. hmmzz. nothing left..EXIT. In meanwhile
> when nothing is there and qrunner did exit its proc, crontab starts
> every minute qrunner. When nothing found.. exit. When found
> files.. start the whole process again.  (So i see it)

Right.

> For now i do not think it is an MTA/DNS problem, but qrunner is the
> problem.  It sits there in memory and is doing nothing at
> all. (besides checking between 4 and 10 minutes the qfiles dir).

<sigh>

> This costs me lots of hard drive space for useless information.  Is it
> a faillure?

No, a warning.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.