We have recently switched our default local mail delivery agent in
sendmail 8.9.0 (on AIX 4.3.1) to procmail (v 3.11pre7). It noramally
works just fine but every once in awhile we get thousands of hung procmail
processes. I think this is caused by one procmail locking the inbox (with
.locking I think) and then the second one tries to get the lock and fails.
As far as I can tell it then hangs around for awhilewaiting to try to get
a lock. But once we get 800-900 of these at one time, the machine starts
paging and the only thing we can do is shutdown mail, and kill all the
procmail processes, then things seem to work again.
So my question is is there a way to tell procmail to try to get a lock,
and if it fails to just requeue the mail and exit? I've looked at the
config.h file and noticed some promising defs like DEFlocktimeout,
DEFtimeout, and DEFnoresretry, but am reluctant to change it without a
little better understanding of what could be going on.
As a side note my first though was to enable verbose logging, can I do
this in the /etc/procmailrc by defing a LOGFILE and turning on Verbose?
Will users .procmailrcs still be read in also overriding any values I set
in there for variables?
Thanks in advanace for any help,
Jason
-- Jason Carroll | IATS Systems and App Group 615 Locust St.
-- ccjasonc(_at_)showme(_dot_)missouri(_dot_)edu | Phone: 882-2000
Fax: 884-5240