[cobalt-users] Perl/Sendmail problem?

["Benjamin Tehan" <sysadmin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Problem

I have a Perl/Sendmail problem

I have 170 domains on a server with well over 200 users and I'm getting the
following problems.

When I goto a feedback form that emails a specific address with the contents
of the page, sendmail takes a very long time to send.

This is ok, but I'd like to improve it.

I did a list of both sendmail and majadoro processors to see what's
happening and they are both using arround 100 different processors/pid's at
once.

Problem: After a while the cgi returns the error that the server could be
down or could be under a heavy load but the sendmail still finishes it's
jobs on the que

Does perl wait for a specific time set to get a reply from sendmail to say
that the mail has been sent, and if not replies that the server is to busy
or so forth?

And why is it taking so long to send a simple email.

Some of the sendmail prossesors running on the server are running 10 minutes
or more, maybe the process has hang or someone is sending a very big file on
a slow connection.


/var/log/maillog returns alot of this, I'm talking about millions of lines
in just today.

Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.9) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.15) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.21) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.53) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.52) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.13) failed: 1
Jul  4 05:23:17 dom1 sendmail[25906]: gethostbyaddr(203.117.93.31) failed: 1


Can some one please advise me on what I can do to improve this problem.

Benjamin Charles Tehan