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 <
floyd.lists@gmail.com>
To: Main PLUG discussion list <
plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
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, <
fouldragon@aol.com> 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() [<a href='function.mail'>function.mail</a>]: 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?
>
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