[Mailman-Users] OutgoingRunner processes hanging

[Mark Sapiro]

On 11/15/19 11:34 AM, Kevin Bowen wrote:
>> If you don't remove the .bak file, it will be recovered and reprocessed
> when the runner is restarted. In this case, any recipients that were
> delivered previously will get duplicates.
> 
> Question: say there's a transaction in progress delivering a mail with
> 10,000 recipients, and you have SMTP_MAX_RCPTS set to say 100. If you
> restart mailman in the middle of it (leaving the .bak file in place), will
> it restart the entire transaction, re-sending to all 10,000 recipients, or
> just the 100-recipient chunk it was working on at the time of the restart?


All 10,000. The .bak file is the original queue entry, renamed to .bak
for recovery at the start of processing by OutgoingRunner. Recovery will
increment a count in the metadata so that entries that cause the runner
to crash won't be retried forever, and then just requeue the original
with all 10,000 recipients.

This process knows nothing about the actual delivery details such as
VERP, personalization and chunking (SMTP_MAX_RCPTS).


> Also, in the performance tuning doc, it says that smaller settings for
> SMTP_MAX_RCPTS are more performant (I believe it recommended 10), but if
> you're sending a mail with a large attachment, doesn't a smaller value here
> necessitate repeating the data segment of the mail more times?


Yes. The tuning tips were written some time ago when a typical
discussion list post was a relatively small amount of text with no
attachments. However, if you consider the entire process including the
MTA (I realize in your case the MTA is remote and doesn't contribute to
load on your server), even if you send one large chunk with 100
recipients, the MTA is probably going to have to deliver that to many
MXs and copy the data to each one.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan