exim performance hint

[Lance Tagliapietra <lancetag@Luminet.net>]

Hello,

Summary: clean exim dead letter database

For the past several months I have seen my Debian 68K system run slower
and slower.  Checking is ps ax showed that every 5 minutes or so, exim
would be running for about 5 minutes.  I mean, I thought I got a low of
spam, but..

Looking closer, exim is run by a cron task periodically, to try to
re-send email that could not be sent, or was queued for some reason.  If
the message could not be delivered, it sits in the queue.  Due to a
mis-configuration of exim, I had system messages to root sitting in
there, all the mail to support popularity-contest, and others, for about
6 years!  There were about 1000 files there to be processed, each time,
which simply took time.

So, take a look at

#du -a /var/spool/exim

output, and if thre are any files in the /var/spool/exim/input or
/var/spool/exim/msglog directories, there is probably a
mis-configuration in exim that may not be immediately obvious. (note,
the spool directory is used by exim in the process of sending email, so
it does get used.  Files will set there while waiting to be sent, or if
exim has given up on trying to send them).

Note that all this time I was able to send email/ receive email and
didn't really know about much system generated email.

So, now, hopefully, my popularity-contest support for m68k will start
being counted.

--Lance