[rt-users] Tables, database size, backups

[Alex Howells]

Further to my previous email...

> Several issues for us here:
> 
>      *  noticing the problem has happened. Usually this is when a
>         customer complains, or we happen to be *looking* at whether
>         or not RT is sending mail for some other reason.

Actually seeing a lot of error messages on user-crit via syslog,
generated by RT in response to not being able to send mail:

RT: <rt-3.6.1-5511-1201691639-297.49825-5-0 at bytemark.co.uk>Could not
send mail: Couldn\'t run /usr/lib/sendmail: Cannot allocate memory at
/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm line 274. Stack:
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:274]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:103]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/ScripAction_Overlay.pm:240]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Scrip_Overlay.pm:506]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Scrips_Overlay.pm:193]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Transaction_Overlay.pm:179]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Record.pm:1446]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Ticket_Overlay.pm:2442]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Ticket_Overlay.pm:2356]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Interface/Web.pm:570]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/share/html/Ticket/Display.html:140]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/share/html/Ticket/Update.html:216]
[/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/share/html/autohandler:279]
(/home/rt/rt-3.6.1/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:289)

Now I can accept that's a valid response for OOM situations; the
"problem" is that we were out of memory at ~2am, and it takes a full
restart of Apache + FastCGI processes for mail to start going again.
>From 01:52 through 11:47 no mail got sent by our RT :(

>      *  once we have a vague timeframe when RT didn't send replies
>         it's not trivial to take 'existing' responses to tickets within
>         that window and dump them back into the "Send mail" queue.

According to our loghost, that stack trace was thrown ~177 times.
Granted, a lot of those will be comments to CC's and AdminCC's on a
queue but it still means finding potentially 30-40 tickets which we've
responded to since 9am, may have resolved, and re-sending the message!

We'll try to solve this with more regular restarts of RT, and throwing
more RAM into that server, but do you have any ideas?

Alex