Newsletters slowdown

[pguy]

Hi,

We use octeth.com 's newsletter software and while using apache we were able to send out over 50 emails a second - after switching to litespeed, emails have choked and now we send out just over 4 emails a second and after a period, the outbound emailing completely stops.

Anything we are missing? Is it restricting resource usage on certain scripts etc. any clues on where I need to look and fix this?

thanks!

 

[mistwang]

Maybe it uses a large amount of concurrent PHP process to send out the email. Try increasing "Max Conns" "Process Soft/Hard Limit" for the lsphp application.

 

[pguy]

I tried raising Max processes to 500, but no luck. Around 800 emails were sent and now they are stuck. Same problem as stated in the first post..

any leads?

 

[mistwang]

Any error messages in stderr.log, error.log? How many PHP process are running? You can try "strace" on those php process to find out what makes them stop.

How was the emails being sent? through sendmail, smtp or something else?

 

[pguy]

Here is the error in error.log, no errors in stderr.log

2007-07-11 03:02:32.300 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:49852-0#APVH_www.site.com] Connection idle time: 151 while in state: 5 watching for event: 25,close!
2007-07-11 03:02:32.334 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:49852-0#APVH_www.site.com] Content len: 0, Request line:
GET /newsletter/cron_sendengine.php HTTP/1.1
2007-07-11 03:02:32.334 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:49852-0#APVH_www.site.com] HttpExtConnector state: 8, request body sent: 0, response body size: 0, response body sent:0, left in
buffer: 0, attempts: 0.


2007-07-11 03:42:32.425 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:35005-0#APVH_www.site.com] Connection idle time: 151 while in state: 5 watching for event: 25,close!
2007-07-11 03:42:32.425 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:35005-0#APVH_www.site.com] Content len: 0, Request line:
GET /newsletter/cron_sendengine.php HTTP/1.1
2007-07-11 03:42:32.425 [INFO] [206.251.73.212:35005-0#APVH_www.site.com] HttpExtConnector state: 8, request body sent: 0, response body size: 0, response body sent:0, left in
buffer: 0, attempts: 0.

The emails were sent thru MTA, which uses exim.

thanks,

 

[mistwang]

So, I guess the newletter engine uses a cron job to send out the news letter.
The request take long time to finish, so you need to increase various timeout setttings.
"Server"->"tuning"->"connection timeout"
Increase "Initial Request Time" for the lsphp external application.
If it take longer than 5 minutes, set "LSAPI_MAX_PROCESS_TIME" environment variable, http://www.litespeedtech.com/products/lsapi/php


If the vhost is configured through Apache httpd.conf, you also need to increase "PHP suEXEC Max Conn" to run more PHP process concurrently. However, this will affect all Apache vhosts. If you have many vhosts hosted on this server, I would recommend creating a vhost based on our PHP suEXEC vhost template for the new letter delivery only.