faxrunq very broken on large queues
Gert Doering (gert@greenie.muc.de)
Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:16:46 +0100
Hi,
(I took the liberty to copy mgetty@muc.de on the CC:, as I think that it
might be interesting for the archives or for other readers).
On Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 08:39:53AM +0200, Graham Leggett wrote:
> I just tried a bulk fax run of around 400 faxes in the queue, and it
> failed spectacularly. During normal operation, I run faxrunq once a
> minute from cron. The main problem I experienced was that so many
> instances of faxrunq eventually caused the all of them to fail with file
> open errors, pipe open errors, etc. As a result of this, reporting on
> which faxes were sent and which faxes were not stopped working, as
> sendmail wouldn't run correctly.
Uh, faxrunq is not really meant to be run once per minute. If you want
that response time, use faxrunq*d*.
> A suggested enhancement to fix this would be to change faxrunq so that
> there can be no more instances of faxrunq than there are faxmodems. We
> have 5 modems in a modembank, so in our case faxrunq should be
> executable 5 times in parallel only. Any further attempts at running
> faxrunq should cause the program to exit immediately.
*Especially* if you have multiple modems, you shouldn't use faxrunq,
because it's locking/jobs distribution scheme is pretty lame - it was
never meant for that, and doesn't handle it well.
Faxrunqd needs Perl5, runs all the time, and was written for a customer
that sends about 1000 faxes a day over 5 modem lines, all during business
hours (10:00-17:00). It works for them very smoothly since day 1...
(Get a copy of 1.1.19, just for the latest version of faxrunqd. I have
done lots of fine tuning on the scheduler and "kaput modem handler"
between 1.1.14 and 1.1.19.)
gert
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany gert@greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025 gert.doering@physik.tu-muenchen.de