[nzlug] Exim: Limiting outgoing connections on Debian

[Leon Matthews]

Vik wrote:
> Could be that your smarthost is rejecting them as an anti-spam measure.
> Can you do it by direct mailing?


Yes.  One at a time is fine.  When I try to send them all at once:

1) Exim suddenly spawns 70 instances of itself,
2) I see a huge amount of outgoing traffic on port 25,
3) followed about 5 minutes later by lots of 'connection
   reset by peer' messages in the exim log


Daniel wrote:
> serialize_hosts = your.upstream.mta
> This will cause exim to check to see if it already has a
> connection open to a host it is attempting to deliver to,
> and if so wait and reuse that connection instead.

Sounds great.

I'm not sure where to put that directive (grep'ing the config tree did not
help), but I'll have a poke around and see what I can find, thanks.


Craig wrote:
> Start by looking at remote_max_parallel.  It seems to be set
> to only 2 by default?  It would be odd if Exim was behaving
> as you speak; I would have thought, in its default
> configuration, it would realise they are all to the
> same place, and pipeline the delivery.

I would have thought the same thing.  I cannot grep out remote_max_paralell
from my default Sarge exim installation, so cannot report the default here.
I've only ever configured exim using dpkg-reconfigure and choosing the
options pertaining to using a smarthost.

Time for some more experimenting...

Thanks for the feedback,

	Leon