[rt-users] Throttling incoming e-mail

[Kevin White]

Hello:

We're using RT 3.4.1 for our internal trouble ticket system

We have several monitoring programs doing SNMP monitoring.  When they
detect problems, they generate an e-mail, which hits the RT box, which
hits sendmail, then an alias that hits rt-mailgate.  We also have a
scrip (ExtractCustomFieldValues, from the Wiki) running that populates
custom fields (so the body of the messages are parsed).  The messages
are short.

But there can be lots of them.  Which tends to kill the box: memory
exhaustion.

The problem is, lots of messages come in at once, sendmail obliges, and
forks off an rt-mailgate for each one, and then moves on.  Even
throttling sendmail (telling it to only accept x messages concurrently)
causes the problem, because sendmail just forks off the rt-mailgate and
goes on.  It only launches x at a time, but it doesn't care that x! are
still running.  :)

So, I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem.  I see several
solutions.  One would be to see if there's any way I can make sendmail
actually WAIT for the rt-mailgate to finish.  If anyone out there knows
how to do that, that would be nice (and might be nice to put in the Wiki
too).  Barring that, I'm seeing a real queue mechanism, where sendmail
just receives all the mail and saves it (possibly in a maildir, so I can
process them one at a time easier) and I'll use that as a queue, and
right a queue processor that submits those one at a time to rt-mailgate.
 Has anyone written anything like that?  If not, well, I'll probably be
announcing it at some point in the future.  :)

Thanks,

Kevin


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Telsource Corporation
8237 Dow Cir, Strongsville, OH 44136
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