[Mailman-Users] Newbie: New installation -- terrible load average

[Jon Carnes]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 08:44, Benedikt Carda wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have newly installed mailman (2.1.2) on my RedHat 9.0 system (with 
> sendmail). Every time I start the qrunner daemon 
> (/usr/local/mailman/bin/mailmanctl start) the daemon uses 99% of CPU 
> time. This is how command "top" looks like:
> 
> >  12:44:22  up 54 min,  1 user,  load average: 1.00, 1.02, 0.94
> > 62 processes: 59 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> > CPU states:  87.0% user  13.0% system   0.0% nice   0.0% iowait   0.0% idle
> > Mem:   497636k av,  312156k used,  185480k free,       0k shrd,   16288k buff
> >                     113272k actv,     204k in_d,     848k in_c
> > Swap: 1012052k av,       0k used, 1012052k free                   32028k cached
> >                                                                                 
> >   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
> >  1384 mailman   25   0  4800 4800  1932 R    99.9  0.9  17:19   0 python
> >     1 root      15   0   492  492   440 S     0.0  0.0   0:03   0 init
> 
> Anyhow there is absolutely no load as this is only a test installation. 
> I have created only two mailing lists (the mailman list and a second 
> one) and I have only subscribed five users. There are no mails sent, and 
> nothing else. I am running python 2.2.2-26.
> 
> I have no idea what can be wrong and what I should do to correct this. I 
> looked for the problem in the mailing list archives but high load 
> average and CPU time consumption always seems to be connected with two 
> main problems (heavy loaded lists and the lock-problem) but both are not 
> applicable in that case (as locks are created correctly and removed 
> correctly and also the logs do not report any errors).
> 
> Any advice given would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.
> 
> Benedikt.

First of all, I've install Mailman a quite a few Red Hat 9 systems and
I've never seen this behavior. Did you install from the RPM's? and
follow the advice from:
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg18611.html

Most importantly, try running "/var/mailman/bin/check_perms -f"

Assuming your install is correct (and you haven't applied any patches
that you didn't tell us about), lets get more information about what is
going on... 
 - Check your MTA (sendmail) logs and see if it's sending a lot of mail,
especially local mail to "mailman".
 - What do you get when run: grep mailman /etc/aliases
 - Are there any messages in the Queues?

To check the Queues,
 - Stop mailman: service mailman stop
 - cd /var/mailman/qfiles
 - ls *

If there are any messages in the queues you will see them listed out as
pairs of files (with really huge nonsensical names - date.time+MTAqname)

Here is an example from a test install I run. It has three messages in
the queue:
  1063940316.823126+7e222a98096d06bd97f15e251156679fdb034db8.db
  1063940316.823126+7e222a98096d06bd97f15e251156679fdb034db8.msg
  1063991848.0743411+580b8cae276cdbaf50591b5d78fcfbc789031ae5.db
  1063991848.0743411+580b8cae276cdbaf50591b5d78fcfbc789031ae5.msg
  1063991975.730075+0951a3980aae459eb47a4aacef8f64953fc128bd.db
  1063991975.730075+0951a3980aae459eb47a4aacef8f64953fc128bd.msg

The original message should be in text stored in the *.msg file.

Good luck - Jon Carnes