Re: zmailer problems / questions

[Matti Aarnio <mea@utu.fi>]

> I have been working with zmailer for about two weeks and have several
> questions and one big problem.  Currently we are running zmailer v2.2
> on a SUN IPX using 4.1.3.  
> 
> The problem:
> 
> the router process has a huge memory leak that in the course of 24 hours
> uses all physical and swap memory.  I've already added swap and taken to
> restarting zmailer daily, but its not very pretty and we are still at
> real low volume.  
> 
> Question: Has any one seen this problem before and know an answer ?

	Yes, you are running OLD Toronto version.

> Next, I'm buying a new server to run our real mail apps on.  I
> gather from previous posting zmailer will work under solaris 2.3 OK.

	Yes and no, more of the gory war-story once I get the coredrop
	eradicted (possibly GCC problem.)

> Question: Is this a recompile with the 5.4 flags or is it running in
>  emulation ?

	What do you mean with "5.4 flags" ?
	GCC-2.5.6 (soon 2.5.8, I hope) natively, and cross
	compiled on SunOS 4.1.3.  Both seem to work aside of
	native one crashing on some IO-buffer fault in stdio-lib
	(gcc-2.4.5) when processing a mailinglist with more than
	4k characters in the list-file. (Binary-compability mode
	run version from 4.1.3 works just fine on same input!)

> >From what I've read about zmailer, I'm inclined to like its 
> general architecture, but, its reliability looks questionable.  We 
> plan to have a lot of usres (>100,000) in the next 12 months.  No
> not on one host :-), 
> 
> Question: Is anyone interested in sharing their experience with using
> zmailer for very large volumnes ?

	Have you heard of what there was before  comp.os.linux.* newsgroups ?
	THAT was run on Zmailer once they got fed up with old  sendmail
	trashing whole system... (and it still is run on the Zmailer..)

	Current Zmailer source has kludges to circumvent Sony NEWS defficiencies
	on  rename(2)  system call.  Zmailer (scheduler usually) was able to
	crash that machine just by doing frequent rename()s..

> Last, but not least:
> 
> Question: Can anyone point me to tools, docs, contacts, and any other 
> information regarding zmailer that would be of us.

	ftp.funet.fi:/pub/unix/mail/zmailer/
There is "yours truly"'s collection.

New version comes in, once I stop answering your email and start doing
coding/debugging/verifying..

> Many Thanks
> 
> John S.
> 
> that would be of use.

	/Matti Aarnio	<mea@utu.fi> <mea@nic.funet.fi>