Freezing problems

[Chris Wong]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Rodney Davis wrote:

> Thanks for the help with sendmail.  Changing permissions for the new file
> fixed the problem.
> 
> Now I have a problem with linux freezing when i send out a large broadcast
> type of email.  I am using Sendmail and the mail list application is done in
> PHP and perl.  I was able to send out up 20000 at a time at first but I
> started having trouble with linux freezing on me.  So I reduced the number

You shouldn't do 10000 at a time. For one sendmail sucks at large mail
lists and as such, you should take more care in programming. I would
suggest aliases to reduce the load.

It's rather apparent you are killing your system by starting maybe 1000
separate processes of sendmail (no lightweight champ either). You're
basically thrashing your entire system.

Try to create an alias list and then send the alias list. Let sendmail
handle the multiple users instead of sending multiple mail() calls.