sendmail, 4th Edition

Handle Deep Queues

To understand the potential problems associated with deep queues, first consider how sendmail processes a single queue when its QueueSortOrder option (QueueSortOrder on page 1073) is set to the default of priority.^[179] When sendmail is instructed to process a queue it opens the queue directory for reading and reads that directory to gather a list of qf files to process. Each qf file sendmail finds is opened for reading and scanned for important pieces of information. The N line in each qf file, for example, holds the number of times the message has been tried. The P line holds each message’s current priority.

After all messages have been opened, read, and closed, and after the information from each has been saved internally, sendmail sorts that information. The purpose of the sort is to ensure that new mail is tried before old, and that high-priority mail is tried before low-priority mail.

Under normal circumstances, this process occurs quickly. But when queues get abnormally deep, things can go wrong. In the following, which illustrates a problem that can occur, we show one way that sendmail could be run on a major mail-sending machine:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd
/usr/sbin/sendmail -q10m

The idea here is to create two mail-handling daemons. The first handles inbound mail, and because this is a mail-sending machine, we expect that this inbound daemon will perform little work. The second daemon sends all mail it finds in its queue. It will fork(2) a copy of itself once ...