[Mimedefang] 2.2 Mutiplexor not plexing

[Michael D. Sofka]

I've been running mimedefang 2.1 for 3 weeks.  Today I tried updating to 2.2,
but had to back out the update.  The mimedefang-multiplexor was not multiplexing
correctly, or fast enough.

When trying this on a test machine, what happens is that, as expected,
when a lot of email is sent more slave processes are started.  But, not enough
start and not fast enough, and sendmail starts rejecting mail with "try again later."

Running with -d the logs show more slaves being started, but there is no error
to indicate it is out of slaves, or anything was wrong with the slaves that are
started.  In fact, once they are running resending the flood of email works fine,
until the extra slaves are killed.

When I restrict the maximum slaves to a small value (5) and send a flood
of mail then, as expected, I get a "mdconnect: No free slaves" error.

Is it possible that a return message is being sent before the new perl
processes are ready, or that the attempt to link stderr (non-blocking) is
causing this problem?

It doesn't look like a timeout error, since the timeout values are 30 seconds,
and the problem "try again later" messages appear almost immediately.

Mike
--
Michael Sofka                          sofkam at rpi.edu
CCT Sr. Systems Programmer  email, webmail, listproc, TeX, epistemology.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.    http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/