Announced topic slow send; taking 4+ days for 205 emails - how diagnose?

[Vince S]

G'day,

We have all of 206 members on forum and I commonly send out info by Announced topics. I had the email send rate set at 1 per minute and my usual experience is that my dummy member account gets the email a few hours later.

I sent out an Announced topic 4 days ago. The mail queue I just checked said there were 81 messages left all dated 3.9 days ago. As it happened I had reannounced the topic 42 mins ago as I didn't realise hyperlinks in the post would get deleted in the Announced Topic. So there were 205 emails waiting, which is everyone as annoyingly it doesn't send the sender an email to help with diagnosing this exact situation - separate discussion to which I have read the non-answer elsewhere here, which ignores that Newsletters will go to the sender (if chosen) but not Announces. So I deleted the 81. I changed the send rate to 2 per minute.

So how does one go about diagnosing this problem? Sure appreciate some tips.

The queue length is now 200 and oldest message 54 mins. So 5 have gone in 10 mins, allowing 2 mins to delete old ones - is that a clue?

Here are some settings I checked:

Server has Level 1 Caching (Recommended) enabled
Load balancing support is disabled by your host configuration.

Enable Mail Queue: enabled
Maximum emails to send per minute: 2 (was 1)
Maximum amount of emails to send per page load: 0
Mail type: PHP default

SMTP server: (blank)
SMTP port: 25
SMTP username: (blank)
SMTP password: (set)
(confirm): (blank)

Now 195 messages and oldest 59mins. Which is 1 a minute which is what it was set on when the topic was Announced so presumably this doesn't update live and anyway 1 a minute is just fine by me!

[Vince S]

Well I just got my dummy account email, nice to see the links all showing now.

The mail queue shows 158 remaining with oldest 1.4 hours, so things are ticking over as they should now, hopefully it will complete properly. So the situation I walked into was there were 81 unsent emails 3.9 days after they were sent. This is about 2 per hour. I should note my dummy email came in about 19 hours ago so it is not as if they had all been held up then released when some impediment was removed as, if that was the case, there would have been no 81 left now.

I forgot to mention but I checked all the logs and there was nothing unusual; in fact not much at all on any of them - couple of wrong passwords from a person that regularly stuffs 'em up and no odd looking tasks / whatever.

I last did forum maintenance 12 days ago including full database back-ups after hitting pretty well every maintenance function menu item there was.

[margarett]

You should not have 0 emails per page load (IIRC the code defaults to 5 per page load if 0 is entered)

But the behavior you described is odd, really.

Are there users online in the time where no mails were sent? Because SMF has no "background daemon" that keeps sending emails at fixed intervals. SMF sends emails on page load, with calculated numbers. Which means that, if there are no users loading pages, no mails are sent.

[Vince S]

Now 101 messages, oldest 2.6 hours. Which is EXACTLY 1 a minute since last check 94 messages ago

I will not have entered 0 in page loads, there isn't even a help to explain what that means and the explanation given is not something I would guess. I have put 10 in there now. Just a guess.

According to the stats page for the 4 days starting the day I Announced the topic the Page Views counts were 804, 732, 743, 599. The server is half way round the globe so I expect these are not "real time" - but there seems to be plenty!

I logged into CPanel and found fairly consistent activity per attached graph and no errors / unusual goings on in any of the history charts for cpu, inode etc. But again I note Softaculous believes my smf is at 2.0.2 when it is 2.0.10, dunno what their problem is! (separate issue - they renotify me each new version release but of course I already updated off smf's notification days earlier)

Anything else I can check?

Oh look, now at 24 messages left and oldest 3.0hrs.

[margarett]

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.0:Mail


As usual, we do not advise you to rely on Softaculous or other "auto-installers" as we cannot be sure if they deliver unchanged SMF code.

I would suggest you to set 5 mails per minute, 2 per page load.
If you have no errors in your log, SMF seems to be working as expected, but the page loads aren't constant enough to keep the "flow". For now, I can just suggest you to try it yourself. Keep looking at the queue, refreshing the page every few seconds.

[Vince S]

OK, done. Whatever the problem was I haven't seen it before and it is not there now, and I have done nothing to any part of the website / forum / whatever in the relevant timeframe, and I am the sole person with admin rights. So I guess this is a "solved" one, as far as we mortals are going to manage anyway. If it crops up again as an issue at least there are a few facts to ponder here anyway.

My queue is empty - it is likely to be a month or so before another excuse arises to Announce something and see how it goes.

For anyone reading this after the event for some related issue, the settings we are talking about can be found in Admin Maintenance Mail... Settings. Browse Queue is also in the Mail... menu.

[Vince S]

Hmm, just sent out another Announce topic and it was heading for the same deal. No clue why. This is the first attempt after the previously discussed problem.

Selected 195 recipients. Checked the queue half an hour later to see how it was going. 178 in queue, all 34 mins old. That is an average of 1 every 2 mins. Checked 3 hours later and still got 176 in the queue. There was a button saying to send the mail queue now so I hit it. No apparent errors. Got my dummy account email and 2 away from office auto responders a minute or so later.

My settings are still as per earlier discussed, namely 5 per minute and 2 per page load. Stats say there were 815 page loads yesterday and 58 so far today (it is 1:15am here).

So as long as I check the queue it seems I can help myself with this workaround, but there is something amiss and I wouldn't mind sorting it. Whether it is "only me" is a separate question. Or am I just really unlucky here...

PS: No errors in log since somebody's forgot password 2 weeks ago.