[vPostMaster] mail moving very slowly

[Sean Reifschneider]

Wallace Winfrey wrote:
> Sorry, just realized this is rather vague. When I ran 'postfix flush', 
> our load shot up to 60 (on our dual 2.66GHz Xeon machine, 2GB RAM) and 
> stayed there for about 15 minutes, with no discernable impact on 
> actually moving mail in the queue out of the queue.

It sounds like you have 600 messages in the queue, and just have to be patient 
for it to do what it needs to do to process them.  You are running, it sounds 
like, with a concurrency of 60 (maybe the default of 100 from 
/etc/postfix/master.cf?)  This means that 60 processes are running at once, 
and that it will chew for a while and then spit out a bunch and then take on a 
bunch more.

You may see more smooth operation (though not necessarily much faster) by 
reducing this concurrency to just a few, say 2 to 10 for the vPostMaster 
process), so that it only has to chew for however long it takes to handle a 
few messages.

If it takes 10 seconds to chew on a message, and you have 600 of them, that's 
6,000 seconds it'll take to process the queue.  A few hours in other words. 
And if 60 are running at a time, it may take 600 seconds for the first message 
to get spit out.  But a bunch of other messages will get spit out right around 
that same time.  60 messages spit out after 600 seconds, versus 2 messages 
spit out every 20 seconds...  That sort of thing.

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability