Procmail processes

[Paul Howarth]

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 21:09 -0800, Douglas Phillipson wrote:
> I'm seeing hundreds od these maeeages on my pop3 server.  Any ideas what 
> they mean?  Am I bouncing messages from a redhat list or something like 
> that?
> 
> douglas 24858 24854  0 12:06:55 ?        0:06 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas 11957 11952  0 21:05:43 ?        0:00 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas  9429  9112  0 20:48:57 ?        0:00 procmail -f 
> lvlug-bounces at lvlug.org -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas  6770  6768  0 20:30:35 ?        0:01 procmail -f 
> scottphillipson at comcast.net -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas 17518 17517  0 18:37:33 ?        0:02 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas 13618 13617  0 06:19:08 ?        0:10 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas 20845 20844  0 18:54:49 ?        0:02 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas  4635  4634  0 20:17:02 ?        0:01 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas 11557 11556  0 21:02:32 ?        0:00 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas
>   douglas  6528  6524  0 20:28:31 ?        0:01 procmail -f 
> fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com -Y -a  -d douglas

This is procmail delivering lots of mail for user douglas. If
your .procmailrc is complex, this may take quite some time per message.
A useful thing to do would be to have it handle high-volume lists like
this one as early as possible in your .procmailrc so that it doesn't
spend much time processing other rules for lots of messages.

Given the wide range of times for the processes above (some delivery
attempts have been going on for many hours), it looks like you might
have some file locking problems. Have you been receiving mail OK
throughout this period?

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>