Re: [hylafax-users] sendfax (HylaFax) queues timing out before reaching last jobs

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2004.12.05 17:31 Jared Pritchard wrote:
> Hi -
>
> We recently installed HylaFax to automatically send out faxes as we
> need
> via a perl script -
>
> It worked perfectly well except for one thing -
> Due to the time it takes to send a fax, and considering there was 200+
> faxes in the queue, by the time it sent the first 50 odd, the
> remaining
> 150 had been sitting in the queue long enough to reach the kill time &
> expire!

Then you didn't set the killtime for long enough.

> I read somewhere about the same problem, and advice was sort of given
> to
> avoid it, but I can't find where I read it...
> Is it possible to set it up so perhaps the killtime doesn't start
> counting down until the job is attempted or looked at!?

No, because that would defeat the point of killtime.  KillTime isn't 
supposed to limit how long the job is attempted, it is supposed to 
limit how long the job stays in the queue.  If I send an urgent fax 
(and, for example, I send it with a high priority) then I want to 
ensure that it gets delivered in a timely manner.  I don't care about 
how long it is attempted; I care about how long it takes to get there.  
If it can't get there in a timely manner then I'll get it there some 
other way or contact the adminstrator regarding the queue problem.

> If possible I want to avoid setting the kill time to extremely high
> values for obvious reasons (including, we may have to send out
> thousands
> one day, so it will still be ineffective, plus the overhead, extra
> jobs,
> and the non-cancellation of legitimitely bung jobs etc. etc.)..!!

I don't really understand the obvious reasons why setting the killtime 
to an appropriate setting is bad.  If you have 3000 fax jobs to go out 
and two modems to do it on then you can estimate 45 seconds to 1 minute 
per fax job.  That means 37.5 hours to 50 hours.  I suspect that by the 
time the 50th hour comes 'round the queue will only contain jobs 
resulting in "BUSY" signals and "NO CARRIER" signals.  Honestly, I 
think that you can safely kill all of those, but if you want them to be 
tried for longer then you could increase the killtime past 50 hours.

Furthermore, you always have the option of faxalter.  You can, at any 
given time, increase the killtime as needed on any number of jobs.

Lee.

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