Why is techmail taking more than 15 minutes to process?

Environment:

•  Sites which encounter high mail load and/or peak mail submission times.
•  Only available for non-Oracle hosted mailboxes.

Resolution:

Due to the fact that the default time for techmail-s to run is 15 minutes, and in some custom cases it has been reduced down to 5 minutes, you may notice that the techmail-s run logs show a Lock file exists message at peak times and when the run exceeds the default run time. 

It will look like so:

The highlighted runs, take more than the predefined time for which Techmail -s is scheduled to run, therefore use the 'Lock file' placeholder to stop a new run from starting until the old one is finished.

This is the normal behavior for the utility and it should not concern you. If however, after a couple of hours have passed and the run is still stating that Lock file exists (i.e. over multiple runs in a row), then you may wish to contact our Technical Support team by creating a service request via Ask Technical Support and inquiring into the process.

For more information on techmail messages in Utility Stats, refer to Answer ID 1067: Techmail messages in the Utility Stats page.