nice sendmail

[Neil Rickert]

In article <9106252051.AA03876 at sun4.jhuapl.edu> jwm at SUN4.JHUAPL.EDU (James W. Meritt) writes:
>Every time a dozen email messages surge through at once, each one starts a
>sendmail process.  In quick order everything ELSE drags to a stop.
>Is there a way to set things up so that the sendmail processes initiated by
>incoming email is nice'd?

  You can make a directory, say /usr/lib/mail, and move sendmail there.
Then put a shell script in /usr/lib/sendmail which does whatever it likes
before execing to the real sendmail.  You have to be a little careful in
case the shell script is invoked with an alternative name such as
'newaliases' or 'mailq'.  But other than that there are lots of things you
can do in your shell script.

  Before you go to this much trouble, though, look at the options for setting
load averages.  You can set up sendmail so that when the load average gets
too high all incoming local mail is put into the queue and perhaps all
SMTP connections are refused.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert at cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940