Looking at the logs for a few of the times it occured: 13:38:06-- finished spam-assassin processing one message, started another, local delivery. 12:39:34-- Recieved an inbound message from SMTP land 10:21:12-- A message finished 2 seconds previous, a POP3 connection 4 seconds later. There's nothing that looks out of the ordinary. Maybe the 'sendmail' program or whatever part of qmail it maps to hit some internal limit-- "There are 5 running, don't start a new one?" -----Original Message----- From: Floyd Arguello To: Main PLUG discussion list Sent: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 6:41 pm Subject: Re: PHP mail() woes What do your maillogs show? Floyd On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 6:19 PM, wrote: > > Oh, to add more details: > > I tried writing test code which would loop and call mail(). > > Wether I did 20 or 50 iterations, or even running two of the page that > did 50 at the same time, to a local address, it still all worked. > > I also tried sending 50 to "test@invalid.invalid" (since I didn't want > it to bother a real host), and it didn't report any errors at the > mail() function. > > So it's obviously not just a "number of messages being sent" thing-- > the only thing I could see is to somehow monitor all 100+ sites hosted > on the server to see if something hits a critical point. > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: fouldragon@aol.com > To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > Sent: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 5:44 pm > Subject: PHP mail() woes > > > > > > > > > > > Several sites on the VPS I administer send out several "order > confirmation" emails when a specific page is hit. > > Because of the way they run their businesses, it's non-negotiable that > between 3 and ~12 messages are sent out on these occurences. > > The problem is that occasionally--- probably about one in 20 times such > a page is accessed, the server error logs fill up with: > > [Wed Jun 11 13:38:06 2008] [error] [client a.b.c.d] PHP Warning: > mail() [function.mail]: Could not execute > mail delivery program '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i' in > /var/www/vhosts/xxxxxxx/httpdocs/feedback.php on line 54, referer: > http://xxxxxxxx > > Since it tries to send a handful of messages at once, they usually come > in clumps of 5 or 6 messages like this. > > I tried correlating the times of the errors with resource warnings in > Virtuozzo; no dice. > > I keep hearing that the PHP mail() call is not intended for bulk > mailing-- but less than 20 messages at a shot is not bulk as I see it. > > The only thing I could see is some sort of resource exhaustion... like > it can only have xxx mail() calls in the air at once, and it exceeds > that limit. > > The server runs FC6 with Plesk 8.3 on top, so the mail setup is qmail, > but it uses xinetd. I saw a few notes about being able to tweak > qmail-smtpd to open more instances, but I'm not even sure that's > relevant to the problem (since mail() calls are coming from local). > > What about replacing /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i with > /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject - someone suggested this? Would that have > any possible difference? > > And what's a good way to find out if this will repeat, other than > sitting and monitoring the logs for an error? > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss