[Mailman-Users] mailman is very slow...

Troy Campbell troy.campbell at fedex.com
Mon Sep 27 06:17:11 CEST 2010


Sorry I realized I hadn't sent a followup email which is why you might
find my reply below a little confusing.  Here is that followup:

I've got a little more information.  I noticed that there was a lot of
"deferred" postfix connections.  When I dumped out the deferred queue
using "postqueue -p | more" and then looked an an individual using
"postcat -q 677F0FE66" for example, then I see someone is trying over
and over again to send an email to a non-existent list and then the list
server is replying back and getting a "connection refused" and putting
that on the "deferred" queue.  Is there an easy way to send the incoming
request to the non-existent queue to /dev/null until I can get a hold of
the admin of the server sending me this?  I'm tempted to create the list
that they are trying to reach and then add a member translated to
/dev/null in postfix but wondering if there might be even an easier way?

Thanks,
Troy

-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Campbell 
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 10:13 PM
To: 'Mark Sapiro'; 'mailman-users at python.org'
Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] mailman is very slow...

The "in" directory went empty soon after I created the "null" list (just
didn't add any members)..didn't even have to stop mailman.  I'm looking
at the "archive" directory now trying to figure out why those files are
there.  It looks like it's one list over and over (different one than
what was generating the "deferred" above).  Is there anything to look at
in particular in the message.  Why are they ending up here?  Side note,
it's kind of odd I can't get into the list through the Web interface
using the site password but can see its contents using the command line.
I wonder if the list is corrupt somehow and should be recreated?

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark at msapiro.net] 
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 9:40 PM
To: Troy Campbell; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] mailman is very slow...

Troy Campbell wrote:

>Thanks Mark for the reply... what I meant by "bouncing" was
>"restarting"...sorry for the slang.  The emails I sent out to the list
>but it took about 3 hours.  There is nothing in the "out" directory
>right now but there are 187 ".pck" files in the "in" directory if that
>means anything and 7624 ".pck" files in the "archive" directory.
>
>I restarted mailman carefully to verify that all processes stopped.
>
>I'm not exactly sure what to look for in the smtp log, which is
>/var/log/maillog in my case.


Mailman's 'smtp' log is with Mailman's other logs in /var/log/mailman/,
but this is not the issue if you have no files in the out/ queue.

The large number of files in the in/ and archive/ queues indicates you
have a mail loop of some sort or you are the victim of a DOS attack.

Stop Mailman. Move those queues aside in their entirety (e.g. mv
/var/spool/mailman/in somewhere/else), and examine the messages with
bin/show_qfiles.

See if more /var/spool/mailman/in/ message files are created with
Mailman stopped (new posts will create them even with Mailman stopped)

Once you figure out what's going on, start Mailman.

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



More information about the Mailman-Users mailing list