CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Somehow, my Mailer Job Size got set to "1". I can't remember setting it to that value: is that the default? I've had problems with previous upgrades with the Mailer Settings being changed during an upgrade, but I don't recall that happening here.

What happened is that we attempted to send an email to 2,000 recipients, with Mailer Batch Limit set to 300 and Mailer Job Size set to 1 and civimail.cronjob.php scheduled to run every 5 minutes. The server crashed and required rebooting. The error logs showed multiple copies of civimail.cronjob.php running simultaneously and errors like "INSERT INTO civicrm_activity_target" failing due to duplicates.

Looking at the code, it seems that ...

• 2,000 "child jobs" were created
• At least 2 of these were attempting to process the same email address (the only way that duplicate record could be created)

I'd suggest that the locking code is broken. I'd suggest anyone considering setting Mailer Job Size should set it to "0".

Ken