[Mailman-Developers] qrunner -- problem with huge mail messages

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:35:26 +0200 
Dirko van Schalkwyk <dvschalk@ing.sun.ac.za> wrote:

> I set Mailman up, created a test list and played with it for a
> while.  Then I send it a big "whopper" 5MB e-mail. I watched the
> logs and saw postfix running the wrapper. The cron started qrunner
> and all hell broke lose (over dramatizing a bit). It started
> running at 100% CPU, where it stayed until I killed it. The
> message was queued in $prefix/qfiles, it and its little .db
> file. I had to remove those as well as the locks in $prefix/locks
> before I could successfully use the list again.

> So I thought, "well maybe the pipermail thingy can't handle the
> huge mime thingies I'm sending it". So I send a smaller attachment
> <150kb.  Things went fine (except for the ugly html page:) ) Send
> it a 1MB attachment. qrunner started spinning it's wheels
> again. Had to seek and destroy again.

Having run lists which had posts with attachments in the 100Meg+
range (some people use mail as a file transfer protocol), and had
them work (admittedly more than a year ago) I'm fairly certain that
this is not a Mailman problem.  Its likely to be an MTA problem or a
system problem (eg spool space).  

Try sending such a post with such a large attachment to yourself
through that same mail server.  Now try the same thing, but with say
50 copies of the same message being sent to yourself in very rapid
succession.  What your system closely.  What happens?

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows