[theforum] list choking

[Dean Mah]

Matt Warden wrote:
> On 12/12/06, Dean Mah <dean.mah at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So the problem appears to be that the e-mail spent a long time in
>> mail.areamail.net's queue and the list archives e-mail by the sending
>> date and not the date the e-mail was received by mailman.
>>
>> Does that make sense or are you seeing a different problem?
> 
> Thanks for the investigation. Actually,I first noticed the problem
> because my own message sent around 2am ET has not  shown up in the
> archive. I also responded to Anthony's message and that has also not
> shown up in the archive. Both were sent via gmail. The relevance of
> the comment about Anthony's message was simply that I received it in
> between my two sent messages. I couldn't tell if this meant thelist
> was receiving and processing mail and there was a problem on my end,
> or if Anthony sent it well before my first message and thelist was
> just now handling it (the latter is what I suspected).
> 
> I can't tell if my emails were distributed, because I do not receive
> my own posts.

Actually, I think that I've discovered the source of the problem, i.e.,
why Anthony's message was stuck on his MTA for so long.  It seems that
something has gone wrong on the server or we are being attacked.  A lot
of the connections to the SMTP server are stuck in the SYN_RECV state
which is causing SMTP connections from legitimate sources to be blocked
and queued for retry.  I'm going to look into the problem further.

Dean