Hi all,

I inherited a production system which uses James 2.2.0 as a backend; it has 
been running incredibly well for several years (approx 5 million emails/month), 
but in the past week a glut of email has begun backing up in the spool folder 
and I have no idea why.  I'm not sure what log fragments or config to include, 
but basically this is a backend server which relays mail to another postfix 
server for delivery.  We have two identical servers running James -- a primary 
and a failover.  The primary got bogged down (performance plummeted, mail 
generation extremely slow), and I noticed over 80,000 (!) files in the 
var/mail/spool folder, of the following formats:

4D61696C313230393536323235303031312D313836353238.Repository.FileObjectStore
4D61696C313230393536323235303031312D313836353238.Repository.FileStreamStore

I've occasionally looked in the spool folder in the past, and there were never 
more than a few dozen files/messages in there, so clearly something is wrong.  
I switched over to our failover James server, which took over and began sending 
out emails at the usual rate we're accustomed to, but now 3 hours later it has 
begun bogging down with 27,000 files in its spool folder.  Another potentially 
performance-killing side effect is that the spool directory itself is now 
almost 7 MB in size (ls -ldh spool), so the OS is probably straining just to 
move files into & out of there.

Since this is happening on both servers, and traffic is not greater than usual, 
I suspect it may be a network issue (our postfix server is on the same subnet), 
but am not sure how to get more details on this.  We have not changed james 
config on these servers in (literally) years, and nothing in the past few days.

Is there any config I can tweak in James to get more details on the reason for 
the backlog?  I've looked at the spoolmanager log files, which are verbose, but 
there's nothing in there which looks very alarming.

Unfortunately, upgrading to 2.3 is not an issue for us at the moment ...

Thanks in advance,

Andy

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