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From: richl@penguin.USS.TEK.COM (Rick Lindsley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: sendmail 5 times faster!?!?
Message-ID: <108@puffin.USS.TEK.COM>
Date: Tue, 3-Nov-87 16:22:07 EST
Article-I.D.: puffin.108
Posted: Tue Nov  3 16:22:07 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Nov-87 03:44:38 EST
References: <751@cad.luth.se> <2994@phri.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@puffin.USS.TEK.COM
Reply-To: richl@penguin.USS.TEK.COM (Rick Lindsley)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR.
Lines: 20

In article <2994@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
	The problem crops up when a whole bunch of mail comes in at once;
    the most common cause being some downstream news site running out
    of disk space and dumping 20 or 30 "rnews: execution failed"
    messages on us in a single uucp connection.  Each one generates two
    sendmail connections (one for my copy and one for the other
    person's copy) driving the loads on the recieving workstations (and
    their joint server) through the roof.  Eventually, the workstations
    can't keep up and the sendmail, ND, and/or NFS connections start to
    time out.

Have you checked to see if your values for x and X in the sendmail config
file are reasonable? They could go a long way towards preventing this sort
of problem. For my 3/50 they are set to 3 and 5, and although we don't have
the setup you describe (my 3/50 has enough disk to be standalone) I think
it would prevent your problem. You might still get an IP storm, but you'll
get either a ETIMEDOUT or ECONNREFUSED on the originating sender, neither of
which should cause the message to be returned .. just queued for later.

Rick