Ubuntu Manpage: md-mx-ctrl - Control mimedefang-multiplexor

Provided by: mimedefang_3.3-1build4_amd64

NAME

       md-mx-ctrl - Control mimedefang-multiplexor

SYNOPSIS

       md-mx-ctrl [options] command

DESCRIPTION

       md-mx-ctrl is a command-line tool for communicating with mimedefang-multiplexor(8).

OPTIONS

       -h     Displays usage information.

       -s path
              Specifies  the  path  to  the  mimedefang-multiplexor  socket.   If  not specified,
              defaults to /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang-multiplexor.sock.

       -i     This flag causes md-mx-ctrl to sit in a loop, reading commands  on  standard  input
              and  printing  results  to standard output.  It is intended for use by a monitoring
              program such as watch-mimedefang.

COMMANDS

The following commands are available:

status Prints the status of all worker Perl processes in human-readable format.

rawstatus
Prints the status of all worker Perl processes in a format easy to parse by
computer. The result is a single line with six words on it. The words are
separated by a single space character.

Each character in the first word corresponds to a worker, and is "I" for an idle
worker, "B" for a busy worker, "S" for a worker which is not running, and "K" for a
worker which has been killed, but has not yet exited. A worker is "idle" if there
is a running Perl process waiting to do work. "Busy" means the Perl process is
currently filtering a message. "S" means there is no associated Perl process with
the worker, but one can be started if the load warrants. Finally, "K" means the
worker Perl process has been killed, but has yet to terminate.

The second word is the total number of messages processed since the multiplexor
started up. The third word is the total number of workers which have been
activated since the multiplexor started up. (That is, it's a count of the number
of times the multiplexor has forked and exec'd the Perl filter.)

The fourth word is the size of the queue for request queuing, and the fifth word is
the actual number of requests in the queue. The sixth word is the number of
seconds elapsed since the multiplexor was started.

barstatus
Prints the status of busy workers and queued requests in a nice "bar chart" format.
This lets you keep an eye on things with a script like this:

while true ; do
md-mx-ctrl barstatus
sleep 1
done

histo Prints a histogram showing the number of workers that were busy each time a request
was processed. A single line is printed for the numbers from 1 up to the maximum
number of workers. Each line contains the count of busy workers (1, 2, 3 up to
MX_MAXIMUM), a space, and the number of times that many workers were busy when a
request was processed.

load Prints a table showing "load averages" for the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes
and 10 minutes.

Each row in the table corresponds to a time interval, displayed in the first
column. The remaining columns in the table are:

Msgs: The number of messages scanned within the row's time interval.

Msgs/Sec: The average number of messages scanned per second within the row's time
interval.

Avg Busy Workers: The average number of busy workers whenever a message was
scanned. (If you are processing any mail at all, this number will be at least 1,
because there is always 1 busy worker when a message is scanned.)

If you have the watch(1) command on your system, you can keep an eye on the load
with this command:

watch -n 10 md-mx-ctrl load

If you do not have watch, the following shell script is a less fancy equivalent:

#!/bin/sh
while true; do
clear
date
md-mx-ctrl load
sleep 10
done

rawload

Prints the load averages in computer-readable format. The format consists of
twenty-nine space-separated numbers:

The first four are integers representing the number of messages scanned in the last
10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The second four are floating-point numbers representing the average number of busy
workers in the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The third four are floating-point numbers representing the average time per scan in
milliseconds over the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The fourth four are the number of worker activations (new workers started) over the
last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The fifth four are the number of workers reaped (workers that have exited) over the
last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The sixth four are the number of busy, idle, stopped and killed workers.

The seventh four are the number of messages processed, the number of worker
activations, the size of the request queue, and the number of requests actually on
the queue.

The final number is the number of seconds since the multiplexor was started.

load-relayok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_relay calls.

load-senderok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_sender calls.

load-recipok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_recipient calls.

rawload-relayok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_relay calls. Note that the worker
activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only valid in a
rawload command.

rawload-senderok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_sender calls. Note that the
worker activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only
valid in a rawload command.

rawload-recipok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_recipient calls. Note that the
worker activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only
valid in a rawload command.

load1 nsecs
The load1 command displays the load for various commands over the last nsecs
seconds, where nsecs is an integer from 10 to 600. The load1 command combines the
output of load, load-relayok, load-senderokf and load-recipok into one display.

You might use the command like this:

watch -n 10 md-mx-ctrl load1 60

rawload1 nsecs
Returns the load1 data in human-readable format. The result is a line containing
twenty-six space-separated numbers:

The first three numbers are the number of scans performed in the last nsecs
seconds, the average number of busy workers when a scan was initiated and the
average number of milliseconds per scan.

The second three are the same measurements for filter_relay calls.

The third three are the same measurements for filter_sender calls.

The fourth three are the same measurements for filter_relay calls.

The thirteenth through sixteenth numbers are the number of busy, idle, stopped and
killed workers, respectively.

The seventeenth number is the number of scans since mimedefang-multiplexor was
started.

The eighteenth number is the number of times a new worker has been activated since
program startup.

The nineteenth number is the size of the request queue and the twentieth number is
the actual number of queued requests.

The twenty-first number is the time since program startup and the twenty-second
number is a copy of nsecs for convenience.

The twenty-third through twenty-sixth numbers are the number of workers currently
executing a scan, relayok, senderok and recipok command respectively.

workers
Displays a list of workers and their process IDs. Each line of output consists of
a worker number, a status (I, B, K, or S), and for idle or busy workers, the
process-ID of the worker. For busy workers, the line may contain additional
information about what the worker is doing. The command slaves is a deprecated
synonym for this command.

busyworkers
Similar to workers, but only outputs a line for each busy worker. The command
busyslaves is a deprecated synonym for this command.

workerinfo n
Displays information about worker number n. The command slaveinfo is a deprecated
synonym for this command.

reread Forces mimedefang-multiplexor to kill all idle workers, and terminate and restart
busy workers when they become idle. This forces a reread of filter rules.

msgs Prints the total number of messages scanned since the multiplexor started.

ADDITIONAL COMMANDS

       You can supply any other command and arguments to  md-mx-ctrl.   It  percent-encodes  each
       command-line  argument,  glues  the encoded arguments together with a single space between
       each, and sends the result to the multiplexor as a  command.   This  allows  you  to  send
       arbitrary  commands  to  your  Perl  workers.   See  the section "EXTENDING MIMEDEFANG" in
       mimedefang-filter(5) for additional details.

PERMISSIONS

       md-mx-ctrl uses the multiplexor's socket; therefore, it probably needs to be run  as  root
       or the same user as mimedefang-multiplexor.

AUTHOR

       md-mx-ctrl was written by Dianne Skoll <dfs@roaringpenguin.com>.  The mimedefang home page
       is https://www.mimedefang.org/.