[Mailman-Users] Keeping process count low

Richard Barrett r.barrett at openinfo.co.uk
Wed Aug 6 16:43:20 CEST 2003


On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 04:54  am, Amardeo Sarma wrote:

> In the meanwhile, I am getting around 200 error messages a day  
> complaining about "cannot fork". I have tried various settings of  
> SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION and MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS, but that  
> does not seem to help. Does anyone know what the problem could be?
>

This is not a problem I have had to deal with but I suspect that, as  
the problem arises when the MTA delivering to MM is trying to spawn a  
process to perform the delivery, that changing  
SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION and MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS will not help  
much.

These MM config variables are concerned with limiting MM's use of  
resource when trying to pass outgoing messages to the outbound MTA  
(which may or may not be the same as the inbound MTA). Only indirectly  
will they impact on delivery to Mailman by the MTA.

Mailman's delivery function is low cost and concerns itself solely with  
taking the message from the MTA and getting into the qfiles directory  
on disc. Once that is done, the heavy lifting of the mail list  
processing is done by the qrunner daemons.

I suspect you need to provide some idea of what type of machine (CPU,  
clock rate, memory, disc etc) you are running, what OS and its version,  
what MTA and such to get some more intelligent feedback from the list  
than I can provide.

> Amardeo.
>
> --On Dienstag, 5. August 2003 19:52 +0200 Amardeo Sarma  
> <sarma at gwup.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> since a larger number of lists are hosted on our server, I am running
>> into a problem with the number of processes on the server, which is
>> limited. Is it a way out to set some limit on:
>>
>> SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION
>>   or
>> MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS
>>
>> Any other suggestions to keep the number of concurrent processes down,
>> even if delivery takes a bit longer?
>>
>> Typical errors I get are:
>>
>>    ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
>> "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces abc"
>>     (reason: 2)
>>     (expanded from: <abc-bounces at xyz.tld>)
>>
>>    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
>> Cannot fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
>> 554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 2
>>
>> It seems to me that this indicates that the maximum number of allowed
>> processes has been exceeded.
>>
>> Amardeo.
>>
>
> --
> Amardeo Sarma
> sarma at gwup.com
>
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Richard Barrett                               http://www.openinfo.co.uk





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