Amavis "goes to sleep"

I occasionally have issues (not very often) where my mail
queue will
just pile up.  This morning I found that about 12 hours had
put 7000
items in the mail queue.  And amavis just seems to be
"asleep".  I can
see multiple idle amavisd threads doing nothing, and
restarting the
server, restarting amavis, restarting postfix, nothing seems
to help. 
Today I managed to finally get things flowing by turning off
the inbound
firewall port to 25 for awhile, and suddenly the amavis
threads took off
and started pulling down the queue.  I let amavis process
about 1000
messages, then I turned on port 25 again so mail could start
coming back
in, and things seem to have settled down and the queue is
steadily
dropping.

Has anyone else ever experienced this?  About 18 months ago,
I had to
put a cron job on to restart postfix every 10 minutes to
keep things
moving (amavis threads then would show "idle" too,
and only reloading
postfix would kick it, then they would go to sleep again). 
An update to
Maia along the way seems to have stopped that issue.  But
this new one
has happened to me about 3 times in the past 12 months, and
when it does
it takes me HOURS to get mail flowing again.  And whatever I
did "last
time" doesn't seem to fix it "this time".

SLES9 and SLES10 servers have experienced this.

Thanks.

Danita


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> -----Original Message-----
> From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-
> bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf Of Danita Zanre
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 9:18 AM
> To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
> Subject: [Maia-users] Amavis "goes to sleep"
> 
> I occasionally have issues (not very often) where my
mail queue will
> just pile up.  This morning I found that about 12 hours
had put 7000
> items in the mail queue.  And amavis just seems to be
"asleep".

Funny you should mention that.  I had exactly the same
problem once at a
client site.  I never really figured out what I did to fix
it - I just kept
"trying things" and it suddenly sprang to life. 
This one is an older
installation - I couldn't say what version of Maia offhand
(probably a year
old, or thereabouts).

It happened a second time on a new installation Friday
evening.  When I left
the site Friday, postfix was complaining that amavis was
refusing incoming
connections and the mail queue was backing up as a result. 
Figuring I was
too tired and had screwed something up, I went home for the
day.  Come
Saturday, I logged into the box to get it running.  The
funny thing was that
by then it was working again - no troubleshooting done.

No one else had logged into the box, at least according to
'last'.  I wrote
both instances off as an anomaly, and it may well be, but I
thought I'd
share so you know you aren't going crazy. 

- Brock

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