[Esd-l] Making procmail play "nice"

[Pierre Etchemaite]

Le Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:54:04 -0600, Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org> a écrit :

> John, have you considered adding an option that "nices down" Perl and 
> Procmail so that other tasks can run?

>From my experience (that doesn't come from email servers, but I think the
mecanisms are similar enough), slowing down the last stage of a queueing
mecanism is a receipe for disaster. Queue will build up, and while it won't
solve your CPU usage problem, you'll have a memory usage problem too.

Either your mail server must temporary reject new incoming jobs when it has
already too many tasks at hand (check your email server docs for "load
handling" or similar), or you must filter worms to /dev/null as soon as
possible in your procmailrc so they're no longer a problem. That requires
solid filtering rules, but it may be the most effective answer to the
problem.

BR,
Pierre.