Re: sendmail fails to deliver mail with attachments in /var/spool/mqueue

Jeff V. Merkey
2000-11-11T17:07:59Z

On Sat, Nov 11, 2000 at 12:54:20PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 05:46:29PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > Yes, the documentation is broken. Linus did in fact implement this
>
> Well, also the implementation could be improved IMHO, think when we have one
> houndred of tasks sleeping in uninterruptible mode because the nfs server is
> down for maintenance. They're no loading the machine at all for half an hour
> even while the load is 100. For sure the fix is not to account only runnable
> tasks though, since when the machine trashes into swap all tasks blocks and
> they almost never runs but in such a case we must report that all tasks are
> trying to make progress and that they're effectively loading the machine even
> if they sleeps in uninterruptible mode all the time. I'd prefer a generic
> approch but also a magic for some case like nfs server down could take care of
> that.

I've actualy seen this with a bunch of NFS clients idle, and sendmail stops
delivering email until the load average drops. What's of more concern is
the intense VM implementation Rik has done -- it's a great piece of work,
but it appears when heavy swapping is going on, sendmail also stops
delivering email as well.

8)

Jeff

>
> Andrea