Mail list delays

Mail list delays

[Jeffrey A Law]

I haven't timed a message recently, but I suspect the multi-day
delay problem should be much better now.

Some recent changes we made to the mail configuration on Cygnus's
mailserver have reduced the size of the bulk queue to about 1/3
of its previous steady state size.  As a result I think messages
are getting to most recepients much quicker than before.

We've got more changes planned, but it will be a while before we
can implement them.  Hopefully the recent changes are enough to
keep things from getting too bad before we can put the long term
fixes in place.


I'm kinda hoping that the duplicate mail message problem was due to
a locking/race issue or some such that was exposed by the huge 
queues.  If not we'll have to do more digging.

jeff

Re: Mail list delays

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Wed, 15 Apr 1998, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> I haven't timed a message recently, but I suspect the multi-day
> delay problem should be much better now.

Yes, it's much better. On the other hand...

  Received: from cygnus.com (runyon.cygnus.com [205.180.230.5])
            by vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA13683;
            Wed, 15 Apr 1998 23:54:46 +0200 (MET-DST)
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 12:14:10 +0200 (MET DST)
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  Subject: include/typeinfo bootstrap failure for current CVS
  Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980414121220.1519C-100000@alcyone.dbai.tuwien.ac.at>

...and our site is quite well connected, so I would tend to think that
this is not that unusual (though today the delay was sometimes much 
less).

> Hopefully the recent changes are enough to keep things from getting too
> bad before we can put the long term fixes in place. 

IMHO a delay of 36 hours is quite unfortunate.

In this case, for example, I received at least four or five different
reports describing exactly the same problem between having sent my own
report and receiving it back from the list. 

Gerald

PS: Clearly this is not to bash you, Jeff, Cygnus or your admin staff!
-- 
Gerald Pfeifer (Jerry)      Vienna University of Technology
pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at   http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

Re: Mail list delays

[Manfred Hollstein]

On Wed, 15 April 1998, 00:16:08, law@cygnus.com wrote:

 > 
 > I haven't timed a message recently, but I suspect the multi-day
 > delay problem should be much better now.

Yes, it is! Today I sent a message at around 8:30am and got it back
from the list at around 9:30am. Thank you for the effort!

 > 
 > Some recent changes we made to the mail configuration on Cygnus's
 > mailserver have reduced the size of the bulk queue to about 1/3
 > of its previous steady state size.  As a result I think messages
 > are getting to most recepients much quicker than before.
 > 
 > We've got more changes planned, but it will be a while before we
 > can implement them.  Hopefully the recent changes are enough to
 > keep things from getting too bad before we can put the long term
 > fixes in place.
 > 
 > 
 > I'm kinda hoping that the duplicate mail message problem was due to
 > a locking/race issue or some such that was exposed by the huge 
 > queues.  If not we'll have to do more digging.

I haven't seen dups recently.

 > 
 > jeff

manfred