I recently updated to phpList v3.3.6 and yesterday I started sending a new Mailing. The send fails repeatedly with this error:
Error: Process Killed by other process
I asked my web host what was happening (i.e. why the mailing process gets killed off) and they replied: I have checked the server logs and found that your account is reaching the resources limits and that is causing the reported problems. Your account is located on a shared environment and in order to protect the server stability and the other clients located on the same server we had to limit the amount of resources an account can use. More details about those limitations can be found at:
If you look further down the page you linked to, you will see Entry points are the number of processes used to serve actual website content.
To me that means you are limited to the number of processes (or sometimes this might refer to files or pages displayed) but the page does not make it very clear as to the time limit for the number of entry points.
If for example you are on the Starter package, is it 10 entry points per minute, per hour, per day?? Not very clear.
Entry processes are the number of processes that enter your account. For example, every PHP page that is accessed by a user will usually generate a single entry process. That limit is for concurrent processes. Let us know if you have any other question or concern and our team will assist you right away.
Does this helps? Any ideas how many processes the phpList needs/requires and if there is a way to reduce its footprint while sending to a list? (i.e. since I send 1 email per 30 seconds, it shouldn’t leave the process open all the time, right?)
Still trying to figure this out… Perhaps my settings are not good?! Here is what I got in my config:
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,100);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,30);
Should I be using Batch processing to reduce the footprint? (i.e. use less processes - would that work to reduce the number of processed used by phpList?). How is this done if, let’s say, I’m ok with sending an email each 30 seconds? (or even 1 per minute if that makes it work…)
I played around with my send speed - set it to send 1 email per minute (ZZzzz!!!) but after 43 minutes, that stopped with the error:
Unable get lock for processing
There were 3 ‘alive’ in the last entry of phplist_sendprocess…
I killed those and restarted.
How can sending 1 email per 60 seconds be too much for a server? Or is there something amiss in phpList? I’m confused… and I don’t know what to try next. This worked fine in the last mailing I sent a couple of weeks ago…
@TheOnlySheet It looks like there are several instances of phplist running. One cause is that the process fails but does not terminate.
If you want to process the queue through the browser then you should change the batch settings to use batch processing with a batch period of 60s and batch size commensurate with that.
But it is better to use a cron job, which will have fewer restrictions.
@TheOnlySheet are you still getting the “killed by other process” message?
That indicates the phplist process that is not terminating properly. That then causes a build-up of zombie processes that hits the hosting limit of the allowed number of processes, nothing to do with processing resources such as cpu time or memory.