12.5.8 SMTP Channel Threads

Keywords: threaddepth,

The multithreaded SMTP client sorts outgoing messages to different destinations to different threads. The threaddepth keyword may be used to instruct the multithreaded SMTP client to handle only the specified number of messages in any one thread, using additional threads even for messages all to the same destination (hence normally all handled in one thread). The default for this keyword is 10.

Each time the backlog for a channel increases past a multiple of threaddepth, the Job Controller tries to increase the amount of processing dedicated to processing messages queued for that channel. For multithreaded channels, the Job Controller advises any job processing messages for that channel to start a new thread, or if all jobs have the maximum threads allowed for the channel (MAX_CLIENT_THREADS in the option for the tcp_* channels) it will start a new process. For single-threaded channels it will start new process. Note that the Job Controller will not start a new job if the job limit for the channel (maxjobs) or the pool (JOB_LIMIT) has been reached.

Essentially, threaddepth controls how aggressive jobs are scheduled. Let's consider two different situations:

(1) a normal (outbound) SMTP channel

(2) a forward-to-a-smart-host SMTP channel

The job controller sorts messages destined for a particular channel by the destination host, and it schedules the jobs to process messages based on the backlog on these destinations hosts.

In the first instance, there will be a large number of destination hosts and the backlog for most of them will be small. There will be lots of threads running and everything should work well, except, perhaps, for destination hosts like aol, yahoo, hotmail, and so on, where there can be a large amount of traffic. With a thread depth of 128, you'd only get a second thread delivering to yahoo once the backlog reached 128. This is not desirable.

In the second instance, there is only the one destination host and having many threads delivering to that host are desirable. If anything, the default value of 10 could be too small.

Use of threaddepth may be of particular interest for achieving multithreading on a daemon router TCP/IP channel—a TCP/IP channel that connects to a single specific SMTP server—when the SMTP server to which the channel connects can handle multiple simultaneous connections.