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I've installed Bugzilla 4.4.5 from source on a CentOS 5 machine. Served through a virtual host on the standard CentOS 5 Apache install, using MySql and installed-from-source Perl.

Originally the system worked well. A few weeks later, users were complaining that saving changes took an inordinately long time.

[Rough] Statistics (all in seconds):

  • Min: 4.56
  • Avg: 4.84
  • Max: 5.02

There were additionally reports that users 1,000 km further away from the server experienced delays of up to 30 seconds.

For comparison, Bugzilla's test site (landfill: https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch) had the following statistics, despite being hosted a world away:

  • Min: 1.91
  • Avg: 2.335
  • Max: 2.58

As opposed to updating bugs, viewing bugs is fast.

MySql statistics suggest nothing is wrong with the database.

kwutchak
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1 Answers1

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The issue was, believe it or not, sending email.

Bugzilla has no internal way of putting email in a queue and sending it in the background. So unless it is specifically configured, all emails must be sent before the "Save" completes.

Bugzilla does mention this problem, but I only found this late in the game (and after I had started putting trace logic into the Bugzilla code :). Under Administration | Parameters | Email:

use_mailer_queue:

In a large Bugzilla installation, updating bugs can be very slow, because Bugzilla sends all email at once. If you enable this parameter, Bugzilla will queue all mail and then send it in the background. This requires that you have installed certain Perl modules (as listed by checksetup.pl for this feature), and that you are running the jobqueue.pl daemon (otherwise your mail won't get sent). This affects all mail sent by Bugzilla, not just bug updates.

Enabling use_mailer_queue seemed to me like asking Bugzilla to run a mini sendmail daemon. I opted instead to install Postfix (which I also have more familiarity with), and switched Bugzilla to use the machine's sendmail (mail_delivery_method: sendmail). The new statistics:

  • Min: 0.975
  • Avg: 1.015
  • Max: 1.140

Emails also received for all tests... :)

Community
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kwutchak
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  • Could you name previous email sending method and previous MTA? – AnFi Oct 09 '14 at 07:08
  • I had no MTA or email sending method configured at all. As Bugzilla was (initially - when it was slow) configured *not* to use a mail queue it would have used whatever its default approach was... I don't know at the time I'm writing this comment what that was. Given the delay, contact the remote Smtp sever perhaps? – kwutchak Aug 25 '19 at 11:34