Steve Plemmons writes:
>
>
> I've had a number of people complaining about delays of 12-24 hours in
> e-mail delivery. The delay seems to involve the mail.msu.edu server each
> time.
>
We have been having severe load issues the last few weeks with mail.msu.edu.
When load increases past 20 on a box, it starts queueing mail instead of
processing it for delivery. This works fine, generally. However, if load
doesn't subside quickly after doing this, the queues get large and take a
long time to empty. The issue of "more mail" (read: more junk) getting
shoved down our system's throat every day is compounded by the fact that the
spam assassin rules continue to get more complicated to cope with "more
junk." This leads to higher overall loads and more time spent processing
each message.
You can look at the stats and see what is happening:
http://project.mail.msu.edu/~rrdtool/
It's important to note that while looking at the stats, you consider that
some queued mail is trying to be delivered to a non-local host which is not
available.
We have planned some design changes to our delivery process which should fix
this problem, but is dependant on the addition of some hardware (we've
requested funding, and will find out about that at the start of the fiscal
year).
In the meantime, we are working on a stopgap. When we make a change, I will
ask the group to note any continuing issues.
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