roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (06/09/89)
Whenever our link to the outside world goes down, local mail gets
real slow (like messages spending over 30 minutes to an hour in the
sendmail queue). We're running sendmail 5.59 with the IDA enhancements and
bind 4.8. I suspect that what is happening is that our named is trying to
contact some outside named to resolve an address and timing out, but I
don't see why it should do that on local addresses. Apparantly, whatever
it is, it's not critical because eventually the mail does get delivered.
Can somebody give me some hints as to what might be happening and
how to prevent it?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (06/09/89)
roy@phri.UUCP writes:
Whenever our link to the outside world goes down, local mail gets
real slow (like messages spending over 30 minutes to an hour in the
sendmail queue).
...
Can somebody give me some hints as to what might be happening and
how to prevent it?
What is probably happening is that your mailer is timing out on every
single request made of your nameserver, because your nameserver is
occupied with timing out in attempts to do things like check with
primaries for status of its secondary zone dumps. While the
nameserver is so occupied, it won't pay any attention to ordinary
requests from the mailer.
The solution to your problem is probably to install the asynchronous
zone transfer stuff that has been discussed from time to time;
probably your best bet is to bring up UToronto's modified BIND, which
has all the good bug fixes + async zone xfer + a few bazillion other
neat features. (I haven't brought it up yet myself, but our
connection to the outside world has been so stable that it is only in
the most rare circumstances that I have anything to worry about.)
--Karldcrocker@AHWAHNEE.STANFORD.EDU (Dave Crocker) (06/13/89)
Does sendmail place mail into separate queues, depending upon destination? If not, then a large queue is subject to the degradation of linear search. Dave