Spawning multible smtp transport agents.

[Kevin O'Donnell <kevino@nds.netsvc.istar.ca>]

Hello everyone...

I have set up the following scheduling stanza for smtp delivery to a machine, but it is not behaving as I have expected it to.  Even after a queue of 5000 messages devellopped, the scheduler did not spawn additional smtp TA's to process the thread.  I've set both maxchannel and maxta to large values, set interval and retries to very low, but to no avail.

The messages _are_ being routed through this stanza, as the smtp TA logs to the correct log file...

[ excerpt from /opt/mail/zmailer/db/routes ]
istar.ca        smtp!istar.ca

[ excerpt from /opt/mail/zmailer/scheduler.conf ]

smtp/istar.ca
                maxchannel=2000
                maxring=10
                maxta=2000
                interval="5s"
                retries="1"
                skew=1
                command="smtp -sl /var/log/mail/smtp.istar.ca"

Does my interpretation of the man pages reflect the actual intention of 
the keywords?

maxchannel=2000    - if the number of TA's being used on the smtp channel
                     (host independent) does not excede 2000, then scheduler
                     may start another to process mail for this stanza.

maxring=10         - up to 10 TA's may be started to process mail messages
                     for all hosts in the thread.  In our case, all messages
                     in the thread are for istar.ca

maxta=2000         - if the number of TA's being used over all channels        
                      (channel & host independent) will not excede 2000, then
                     scheduler may spawn another.

interval=5s        - initial delay period until we scheduler with schedule
                     smtp TA to deliver mail for this channel/host.  I tried
                     multilple interval times, ranging from 5s to 5m.  No
                     difference.

retries=1          - multiple of initial interval (interval=5s) we should wait
                     until scheduling an smtp TA again.

skew=1             - this isn't entirely clear yet, but I believe this
                     determines how quickly messages just delivered to the
                     scheduler become scheduled relative to other messages
                     in the thread.

Thank you for any advice you can give...

Cheers,
Kevino.
-- 
Kevin O'Donnell
iStar internet inc.
kevin.odonnell@istar.ca