Continued mailman problems

[mpope2]

Hello,

For the past 3 months now, I have been battling with continued, repeated mailman problems, and I am sick of it. This needs to be fixed, plain and simple. I had a thread going here about 2 months ago on this topic, but it was never resolved.

Here's the problem:

Every so often mailman just goes crazy and uses up 100% of the cpu. This is causing MAJOR high loads and downtimes for my servers. It is happening on both of my servers, so I believe it to be a cpanel problem. How do I fix it? Well, If I'm logged in via ssh, I do a &killall -9 python& or just kill off the individual process.

The ABSOLUTE worst part of this damn thing is that the server is up, and (slowly) responds to pings most of the time, so I am never notified when this darn thing goes down.

One thing I have tried to do is add an entry into the crontab every 5 minutes to do a killall -9 python, but this does not work all the time.

Please let me know what I need to do to get this fixed on both of my servers. Thank you.

 

[feanor]

Right....

The key here is to analyze the mailman logs and/or the smtp server logs when python is spinning away like that. If it is skyrocketing, it is most often because of an endless loop occuring with another smtp server elsewhere in conjunction with a mailman posting- or due to a gigantic attachment being transmittied, or due to a buggy db due to an improper email address being added to the list.

There is always a rhyme or reason to this happening, you just have to dig through the mailman logs (/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/logs) or the exim (smtp server) logs , within /var/log, when this occurs.

the mail queue management options included in the WHManager may also help to point you towards a solution as well.

 

[mpope2]

Thank you feanor. I'm sorry if I sounded angry earlier, I've just had a rough day.

Okay, take a look at this badboy from /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/logs/error:
File &/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/HandlerAPI.py&, line 82, in do_pipeline
func(mlist, msg, msgdata)
File &/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py&, line 121, in process
inject_digest(mlist, digestfile, topicsfile)
File &/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py&, line 176, in inject_digest
msg = digest.asText()
File &/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py&, line 245, in asText
return self.Present(mime=0)
File &/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py&, line 313, in Present
lines.append(self.__mlist.digest_footer % self.TemplateRefs())
ValueError: incomplete format

That seems to always happen when I have one of the processes spinning out of control. Does this mean anything to you?

I am looking through the exim logs right now, but have not found anything peculiar. I will let you know if I do.

Thanks!

 

[feanor]

this is a clue that you might have a completely botched email address in the recipients field for the mailman list in question.

.........................
lines.append(self.__mlist.digest_footer % self.TemplateRefs())
ValueError: incomplete format
..........................

Or, there might be symbols & other garbage mailman doesn't understand in the header or footer of the mailman list.

 

[mpope2]

Ok, how would I go about finding out which mailing list caused this error? I've been searching through the error logs but I can't find anywhere that actually specifies a list associated with the error.

Thanks for all of your help on this!

 

[mpope2]

Hmm... this just happened again. I'm checking all logs, and cannot even see any mailing lists being used . Is there anything that I can do to the process while it is running to find out more information about it?

 

[mpope2]

Can anyone offer me any other suggestions? I'm really in a pickle with this one! Thanks!