[Mailman-Users] qfiles constipation

[Andrew D. Clark]

I've had consistent problems with the mailman qfiles directory getting 
heavily backlogged (100-200 files stuck, sometimes for several hours) with 
several various 2.0.x versions of mailman.  The qrunner log shows lines 
like so:

Oct 08 10:03:01 2002 (92546) Could not acquire qrunner lock
Oct 08 10:09:02 2002 (93469) Could not acquire qrunner lock

I'm able to clear the backlog by killing off the currently running qrunner 
processes and removing the lock files in the locks directory.  I've written 
a small Perl script to check the qfiles directory for a backlog and take 
the necessary measures every so often, but that's a bit of a hackish 
solution, I'd say.  Besides the fact that it causes a pretty big burst of 
email to be sent all at once, which some users consider unpleasant.

I'm currently running mailman 2.0.12 (not built from ports) on FreeBSD 
4.6-STABLE, with the qrunner running every 3 minutes.

I see Chris Lawson reported the same problem yesterday.  Anyone else having 
this problem with bursty (around 2-3 emails per minute at peak) high volume 
lists?  Anyone else figure out a solution?  Any mailman developers have any 
input on this?  Perhaps qrunner could be throttled to not attempt to 
process more than N files per run?

--
Andrew Clark
Campus Network Programmer
Office of Information Technology
University of California, Santa Barbara
andrew.clark at ucsb.edu (805) 893-5311