mhonarc-users

Re: Timeout on waiting for lockfile

1999-08-10 13:56:21
On 10 Aug 1999, Martin Bialasinski wrote:

looks like my box is too slow for the archive size. I occasionally get 
the message, that mhonarc couldn't get the lock in time. So I guess it 
is time for th FAQ advice

  NOTE As an archive increases in size, performing updates as a
  message is received takes more processing time.  Therefore, for
  large archives, you may need to do updates through a periodic batch
  process (like via cron(8)) to avoid time-out problems from MHonArc.

Hmm, OK. But how do you do this without creating another race
condition. Is cp atomic, so I can copy the interim mailbox, process it 
with mhonarc, or will a message coming in during the cp operation be
lost, or will this cause a file corruption or such? 

No, cp is not atomic, but mv is as long as you move within the same
partition.

I had the same problem, so I let sendmail deliver mail to file (but don't
use sendmail 8.8 then). Just after midnight I do the following steps

1. Rename the file to a temporary name with mv.
2. Sleep to give sendmail time to finish anything ongoing.
3. Lock the file in the same way as sendmail does (so make sure that there
is no slow ongoing delivery by sendmail).
4. Convert with mhonarc.
5. Delete file.

This has worked very well.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mats Dufberg                                  
Mats(_dot_)Dufberg(_at_)abc(_dot_)se


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