[NBLUG/talk] top output help

[Walter Hansen]

> The one bit I can answer off the top of my head is:
>
>> If I shut down sendmail and then restart it will mail that was sent
>> during the time it was shut down go out?
>
> Depends on the "mailclient" (formally a "Mail User Agent" or MUA), and
> possibly your network architecture (if that's relevant, i.e. if sendmail
> acts as a network mailgate, or standalone for that box).
>
> Some MUA's will activate sendmail (or their designated "Mail Transfer
> Agent," or MTA) for the single message they are sending, rather than as a
> "daemon" or service:  sendmail will start, accept the message from the MUA
> and attempt to send it on to the destination MTA, then shut down (without
> checking the queue, or accepting incoming messages).  If the destination
> MTA issued an error, it will return that to your sender; if the
> destination MTA wasn't up, it will queue the message.
>
> Other MUA's will queue their own mail up when they can't contact a MTA.
>
> Sendmail (and all other MTA's I know of) will automatically examine their
> own queues of unsent messages, when starting, and continue their attempts
> to deliver.  I believe this downtime still counts against the total
> hold-queue time, however, e.g. if your sendmail only queue's for 2 days
> before issuing a "permanent failure" and you shutdown sendmail for a day,
> then it only tries to deliver for a day before giving up permanently...
>
> Of the self-queuing MUA's, most default to attempting to contact the
> server periodically, but IIRC I've a few times run across some that, by
> default, had to be kicked off by hand.

Thanks. That's sorta what I thought. However I talked it over with the one
boss and he really likes getting the real time reports from the processes.

There may be a possibility of getting more RAM in the machine at the ISP,
but previous attempts have failed. I don't really see anything in the top
list that is large and/or easily disposable. I could probably go through
item by item and cut down a few megs, but that's about it. Sendmail looks
like it's occupying about 2megs which would actually only make room for
half of a process, so that's probably not much of an issue.

-- 
This would be real cute NSFW tagline, but I'm married and would get killed.