I can't figure out why my sendmail box would do this.

I have a queue with 1042 messages in it and when I run `sendmail -v -q`
it spools 1042 sendmail processes which cause my load average to go
though the roof, not to mention killing my primary mail system which
this host queues for.

To try and resolve this problem I have added:

define(`confMAX_QUEUE_CHILDREN', `25')

But sendmail seems to ignore this option as I still get one process for
every queued message.

If I set:

define(`confMAX_QUEUE_RUN_SIZE', `100')

Then I only get 100 processes, but the first 100 will probably time out
causing the queue to not really get processed.

I seem to remember that sendmail used to process the queue serially,
which is slow, but I would rather have that then 1000 processes on every
queue run.

Anyone have any ideas on how to resolve this problem?

Thanks,
schu

Oh, almost forgot this is sendmail 8.13.8 on linux.

In article <12hldbdgli94609@corp.supernews.com> Matthew Schumacher
<matt.s@aptalaska.net> writes:
>I can't figure out why my sendmail box would do this.
>
>I have a queue with 1042 messages in it and when I run `sendmail -v -q`
>it spools 1042 sendmail processes which cause my load average to go
>though the roof, not to mention killing my primary mail system which
>this host queues for.

Maybe you have this set?

confSEPARATE_PROC ForkEachJob [False] Run all deliveries in a
separate process.

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org

Per Hedeland wrote:
> In article <12hldbdgli94609@corp.supernews.com> Matthew Schumacher
> <matt.s@aptalaska.net> writes:
>> I can't figure out why my sendmail box would do this.
>>
>> I have a queue with 1042 messages in it and when I run `sendmail -v -q`
>> it spools 1042 sendmail processes which cause my load average to go
>> though the roof, not to mention killing my primary mail system which
>> this host queues for.
>
> Maybe you have this set?
>
> confSEPARATE_PROC ForkEachJob [False] Run all deliveries in a
> separate process.
>
> --Per Hedeland
> per@hedeland.org

Per,

I don't have that config option set, but even when I explicitly set it
to False I still get thousands of processes.

Any other ideas?

schu