Sendmail: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 70

01.16.2008 | Author: major | Posted in Uncategorized

If you’ve ever worked on a server that was being overworked (I know I have), you might see sendmail throw out a message like this one:

Jan 9 14:15:49 mail sendmail[18184]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 70

This is sendmail’s way of trying not to contribute to the already high load placed on the server. Since busy mail servers generally use a lot of disk I/O for the queue, and they may pass mail to other filters (which uses CPU time), the sendmail daemon will refuse to handle mail to help reduce the load.

If you don’t like the values that are currently set, you can change them with the following configuration directives in your sendmail.mc:

define(`confQueueLA', `100')dnl
define(`confRefuseLA', `100')dnl

The confQueueLA defaults to the number of processors in your system multiplied by eight, and the confRefuseLA defaults to the number of processors in your system multiplied by 12. However, it is noted that this default differs between versions as well as distributions.

The two configuration items control when sendmail will process items in the queue only (QueueLA) and when sendmail will stop accepting incoming SMTP connections all together (RefuseLA).

2 Responses

  1. Anonymous Coward September 27th, 2008 at 6:59 am

    I believe that the configuration directives for sendmail.mc should be:

    dnl define(’confQUEUE_LA’, ‘12′)dnl
    dnl define(’confREFUSE_LA’, ‘18′)dnl

    Source: http://tldp.org/LDP/LG/current/santhosh.html

    Basically I tried what you said but my .cf file still had the commented defaults.

    Thanks for the help though - Your page led me to my solution.

  2. Anonymous Coward September 27th, 2008 at 7:01 am

    The quotes don’t seem to come through as expected… the standard sendmail backquote followed by quote should be observed.

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