CA Service Management

Hey everyone,

I recently hit a situation where CA SDM was taking too long to deliver mail messages. By too long I mean 2 days to send a few ones.

In the meantime... the mail queue increased drastically in a few days!!! +380,000 messages to be delivered, and the number increasing! Not to mention mail_queue_undeliverable had +2,000,000 of messages not sent, as there are many, really many users with wrong email address set.

The process which handles this activity is pdm_mail_nxd.exe. The first thing to check is if it is dying. If so, this can be a bug and CA Support should be contacted.

But in this scenario, it was not the case as customer had all relevant fixes installed and the process was not dying.

By default, CA SDM has 3 threads configured for sending emails. This is configurable via MAIL_MAX_THEADS under Options Manager, Email. Before installing it, increase the number of threads up to 20. You will need to check with your Email Server Administrator how many threads should be configured. Once installed, recycle CA SDM. If not possible, you can kill pdm_mail_nxd process and it will recognize the change. This will make all new incoming messages to be delivered.

With so huge number of messages to be delivered, to make it easier to monitor if the mail queue is increasing or not you can issue the following command from the mail_queue folder:

dir [n:] /b/a-d | find /v /c "::"

Where [n:] is the driver or folder to be verified.

This is not enough, however, to have the pending messages to be delivered. From inside the mail_queue folder you must issue:

pdm_mail -c PROCESS_QUEUE
pdm_d_refresh

If necessary, repeat the steps above a few times until you see the messages being delivered. Important: had customer delete all messages from mail_queue_undeliverable, as in this case, they would really not be sent for having a wrong email set for users.

And that made the trick! In 6 hours all +380,000 messages had been sent.

Hope you all have a great week!

Sandra

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The following documents can be used for reference:

Users might experience delay in receiving email no - CA Knowledge 
Email notifications are not being sent out and fil - CA Knowledge 

Sandra_Antunes:

Hey everyone,

I recently hit a situation where CA SDM was taking too long to deliver mail messages. By too long I mean 2 days to send a few ones.

In the meantime... the mail queue increased drastically in a few days!!! +380,000 messages to be delivered, and the number increasing! Not to mention mail_queue_undeliverable had +2,000,000 of messages not sent, as there are many, really many users with wrong email address set.

The process which handles this activity is pdm_mail_nxd.exe. The first thing to check is if it is dying. If so, this can be a bug and CA Support should be contacted.

But in this scenario, it was not the case as customer had all relevant fixes installed and the process was not dying.

By default, CA SDM has 3 threads configured for sending emails. This is configurable via MAIL_MAX_THEADS under Options Manager, Email. Before installing it, increase the number of threads up to 20. You will need to check with your Email Server Administrator how many threads should be configured. Once installed, recycle CA SDM. If not possible, you can kill pdm_mail_nxd process and it will recognize the change. This will make all new incoming messages to be delivered.

With so huge number of messages to be delivered, to make it easier to monitor if the mail queue is increasing or not you can issue the following command from the mail_queue folder:

dir [n:] /b/a-d | find /v /c "::"

Where [n:] is the driver or folder to be verified.

This is not enough, however, to have the pending messages to be delivered. From inside the mail_queue folder you must issue:

pdm_mail -c PROCESS_QUEUE
pdm_d_refresh

If necessary, repeat the steps above a few times until you see the messages being delivered. Important: had customer delete all messages from mail_queue_undeliverable, as in this case, they would really not be sent for having a wrong email set for users.

And that made the trick! In 6 hours all +380,000 messages had been sent.

Hope you all have a great week!

Sandra

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following documents can be used for reference:

TEC585522  - Users might experience delay in receiving email notifications from Service Desk
TEC499545 - Email notifications are not being sent out and files are growing in %NX_ROOT%\site\mail_queue folder as a result.

 

 

Thanks for the great tip Sandra!

Hello Sandra,

Do you know if there is any option to delete automatically the NDR (non-delivery receipt) messages? We have a lot of accumulated messages because the e-mail addresses of the contacts are not updated. What we need is cancel the message after a number of attempts, removing the message from the queue.

Thanks in advanced.

Hi Fabiano, 

There isn't a way to do it automatically. I only can see this being done externally, via an application  created for it. My suggestion is you post this as a question, so everyone can provide an information there.

But sounds like a good improvement to the tool. 

Kind regards

Sandra