[nzlug] Solved? Exim: Limiting outgoing connections on Debian

[Leon Matthews]

Right --

The situation has been resolved, but unfortunately it remains unclear what
the original problem was.  I think shall have to finally stop putting it off
and finally learn about email servers in detail... :-)

For those interested, the following did the trick.

I added the configuration snippet
'remote_max_parallel = 1' to the debian file
/etc/exim4/conf.d/main/02_exim4-config_options and re-ran the
'update-exim4.conf' script (to tell Debian to reconstruct the monolithic
configuration file).

I then re-ran the script that was sending out the attachements.  I prehaps
should have mentioned this earlier (sorry!), but this script was using the
legacy 'sendmail' command line interface to send emails.  I ended up with
70+ exim processes running by the time the script had finished.

It looks like each 'sendmail' process was waiting around for their message
to be delivered, rather than adding it to the queue and exiting...

I killed them off manually then restarted the exim4 daemon.  It started
processing the now queued messages nicely, one message at a time.

It would seem that the problem was in the way I was adding messages to the
queue using the exim provided 'sendmail' binary.  However, it's not certain,
as I'm pretty sure  I already tried killing off exim and restarting it while
the messages were still queued (before the remote_max_parellel option that
is)

Anyway, thanks for the help Craig, Vik, and Daniel -- a good MTA book is now
on my 'to read' list -- 'solutions' that I don't understand drive me crazy
until I get the bottom of them...

Cheers,

	Leon