[Mailman-Users] Manipulate mailman in / out queue

[Xueshan Feng]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> Xueshan Feng <sfeng at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> >On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Xueshan Feng <sfeng at stanford.edu> wrote:
> >
> >if I want to move quite a few *.bak aside (use timestamp as an
> >indicator of
> >how long they've been in  that state),  Is it necessary  to stop the
> >service, move files, then restart service?
> >We have about 37,000 lists. Sometimes when I try to restart
> >(/etc/init.d/mailman restart), OutgoingRunner won't go away, and had to
> >be
> >killed with -9.
>
>
> This is really more involved than I can explain without a keyboard which I
> won't have before Tues eve, but there should be only one .bak file or one
> per slice if the runner is sliced. This is the message currently being
> processed. All others are ignored by the current runner (they will be
> "recovered" if the runner is restarted).
>

This helps a lot already. We do have multiple runners.


> >So I was wondering by moving files out of the queue without first
> >stopping
> >mailman, caused the OutgoingRunner to suffer.
>
>
> Probably not, but it is possible. More likely, it couldn't be SIGTERMed
> because it was waiting for a SMTP response.
>

Make sense.


>
> Note that part of the slowness at this point is due to the size of the out
> directory.


I was able to flush the queue today by moving long lasting *.bak out of the
way, and at the same time stopped Postfix to allow mailman to process its
queue. It took about half an hour to process 8000+ messages. If no manual
intervene, it may take a few hours.

You can address this by stopping Mailman, moving qfiles/out aside, starting
> Mailman (which should recreate qfiles/out at the first message if not
> before) and then moving old entries back a few at a time.
>

I think I've done that before. So moving back files into the queue in
batches, doesn't have to stop mailman?

The real operational question here is each time if we have to stop / start
mailman to move files,  than for large volume queues, it would take a lot
of manual process. The procedure I have used is:

- stop mailman
- move queue files or .bak file aside
- start mailman
- move some files back, or .bak back into the queue
(note  files are moved back while mailman is running)

Sounds right? thank you so much for your help!

Xueshan




>
>
>
> --
> Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>
> Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>



-- 
Xueshan Feng
Infrastructure Delivery Group, IT Services
Stanford University