The Job Controller

Master channel programs are run under the control of the job controller, a program that controls the message queues and invokes the channel programs to do the actual message delivery. The job controller is a multithreaded process and is one of the few processes that is always present in the Messaging Server system. The channel processing jobs themselves are created by the job controller but are transient and might not be present when there is no work for them to do.

Job controller configuration settings determine if there is always at least one instance of a channel processing program. In many cases, these are set so that there is always at least one instance of the service program even when there is no immediate work to do. In other cases, there will be an instance for a set period of time after it last did some work but there is nothing to do currently.

Slave channels, which accept external messages, by queueing a message, notify the job controller of a newly created message file. The job controller enters this information into its internal data structure and if necessary creates a master channel job to process the message in that queue. This job creation might not be necessary if the job controller determines that an existing channel job can process the newly queued message file. When the master channel job starts, it gets its message assignment from the job controller. When it is finished with the message, the master channel updates the job controller as to the status of its processing. The status is either that the message is successfully dequeued or the message should be rescheduled for retrying.

The job controller maintains information about message priority and previous delivery attempts that failed, allowing for advantageous scheduling of channel jobs. The job controller also keeps track of the state of each job. The state can be idle, how long the job has been idle, or whether the job is busy. Tracking state enables the job controller to keep an optimal pool of channel jobs.

There are currently only two slave channels, SMTP slave and LMTP slave. These programs are controlled by the dispatcher, which is described next.