[Mailman-Users] Outgoing qrunner looping

[Richard Lamont]

I admin (voluntarily, for a non-profit .org) a Linux box (Mandrake 9.2) 
which is running mailman 2.1.2 and postfix.

It's a dual 2.6GHz Xeon with 512MB RAM. Its main job is as a web server, 
but it also runs a few lists. The biggest list has about 400 
subscribers, and the total number of posts to all the lists is 
typically 30 a day. Monthly archives are small and have never exceeded 
a single index page for any list.

The box is lightly loaded. Load averages hover close to zero, and 
there's very little swapping.

Mailman (mailman-2.1.2-9.4.92mdk) has been running quite happily for 
several months. Suddenly, and inexplicably, the Outgoing qrunner has 
started hogging all of one of the CPU's cycles. Restarting with 
mailmanctl makes no difference - it terminates the qrunner processes 
OK, but when restarted the outgoing one just hogs the CPU again.

Upgrading to a more recent version is easier said than done, as there's 
no more recent Mandrake 9.2 package available and I really don't want 
to build and configure mailman from source. It nearly killed me the 
first time and I can't face going through all that again.

Why did it break? What should I do?


-- 
Richard Lamont
<richard at lamont.me.uk>