The Task runner

Mailman has a Task runner that executes periodic tasks.

Configuration

By default, the Task runner executes tasks once per hour to evict expired pending requests, bounce events and cache entries and to delete any saved workflow states and saved message store messages orphaned by deleting the associated pending request. It also deletes saved message files which have no associated message store entry. This timing is configurable in the [mailman] section of the configuration.:

# mailman.cfg
[mailman]
run_tasks_every: 1d

This will run the tasks once per day instead of once per hour. If you have a large installation with thousands of messages in the message store and you find the Task runner consuming a lot of resources when finding orphaned messages for deletion, running it daily rather that hourly is fine.

Logging

The Task runner writes some simple log messages to a new task log.

>>> import doctest
>>> doctest.ELLIPSIS_MARKER = 'xxx'
>>> from mailman.testing import helpers
>>> from mailman.config import config
>>> from mailman.runners.task import TaskRunner
>>> mark = helpers.LogFileMark('mailman.task')
>>> runner = helpers.make_testable_runner(TaskRunner)
>>> runner.run()
>>> print(mark.read())
xxx Task runner evicted 0 expired pendings
xxx Task runner deleted 0 orphaned workflows
xxx Task runner deleted 0 orphaned requests
xxx Task runner deleted 0 orphaned messages
xxx Task runner evicted 0 expired bounce events
xxx Task runner evicted expired cache entries

>>> doctest.ELLIPSIS_MARKER = '...'