SUMMARY: Ideal queue time for sendmail

From: Lenny Turetsky (lturetsk@aida.econ.yale.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 25 1994 - 23:45:57 CDT


First off, thanks to:
     clark rudder <rudder@infonet1.infonet.com>
     gdonl@gv.ssi1.com (Don Lewis)
     Stefan Mochnacki <stefan@centaur.astro.utoronto.ca>
     heasley@merl.com
     ulla@dmi.min.dk (Ulla Fischer)
     Claus Assmann <ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de>
     "C.R. Ritson" <C.R.Ritson@newcastle.ac.uk>
     glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell - Uniq Professional Services)
     Eckhard.Rueggeberg@ts.go.dlr.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
     J.H.N.Chin@reading.ac.uk
     gdonl@gv.ssi1.com (Don Lewis)
     Neil Sobrado <sobrad22@zodiac.cs.newpaltz.edu>
     pamela@Legato.COM (Pamela Pledger)
     Dan Stromberg - OAC-DCS <strombrg@bingy.acs.uci.edu>
     Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
     Jacques.Beigbeder@ens.fr (Jacques Beigbeder)
     eww@hobbes.crc.com (Eric Wampner ORL)
     "Fuat C. Baran" <fuat@tintin.cc.columbia.edu>
     Bill Morrow <morrow@cns.ucalgary.ca>

The general consensus is that -q[1-5]m is too small and simply wastes
resources. Most people suggested -q30m or -q1h.

What most people did not mention (and I did not know about) is that the
reason that mail delivery had been slow at -q5m was that these systems
were set up to do mail processing at queue time *only*. I don't know who
had set it up this way, but the machines here had the line `Odqueue' in
their /etc/sendmail.cf's, which had to be changed to `Odbackground' so
that they would initially attempt to deliver mail at send-time, and only
use the queue if the initial attempt failed.

Thanks to Don `Truck' Lewis (gdonl@gv.ssi1.com) for this insight.

Please note that `Odqueue' and `Odbackground' are equivalent to `Odq' and
`Odb' respectively.

Thanks again to all who responded.

LT

 ,-----------------------------------------------------.
 | Yale Economics Dep't | Lenny Turetsky |
 | System Administrator | lturetsk@econ.yale.edu |
 |-------------------------+---------------------------|
 | My employers paid for some of my time and energy. |
 | My opinions were never for sale. |
 `-----------------------------------------------------'



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:13 CDT