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PMTA knowledge base›Metric§ 5.3

Spool reading at startup

Spool Initialization
The only metric a node has before it is ready

The share of the spool read completed at startup, in percent.

After startup the engine reads the spool, and until that reading is finished the node does not work fully. On a large queue the reading takes noticeable time.

⚠️ The Hub considers a node ready as soon as the management port answers — that is, possibly earlier than the node is really ready.

The main trap is taking a snapshot for a history. The metric describes the moment of polling. Everything that happened between two measurements and managed to end will not get into either of them. For events there is accounting, for state — these numbers.
What the Hub does. It does not collect it — this metric is not among those the node poll reads.

⚠️ The Hub considers a node ready as soon as the management port answers — that is, possibly earlier than the node is really ready.

Recommended values

What to compare with:

Value Compared with
current value the usual one for this node, not the neighboring one
peak the ceiling, if there is one
growth the growth rate, not the absolute number

Fleet nodes are not directly comparable: they have different hardware, different addresses and a different mix of receivers. It makes sense to compare a node with itself over time.

The comparison advice is ours. From the manual here come the metric’s composition and its units of measurement.
Example configuration
# the metric comes in the status snapshot
curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8080/status?format=json"pmta show status
The highlighted line returns the snapshot as a structure — that is how the Hub’s polling reads it. The line below prints the same thing in the console.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
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Related entries

2 relations

Applies to

What to do after a crashAfter an automatic restart the reading starts over — and the queue numbers are incomplete for a while. inference

Where you can see it

Starting and stopping the engineThe part of startup that takes time, and the only sign that it has finished. § 5.3

Referenced from

Spool filesThe same spool at startup, when its contents are read back into memory. § 5.3

How to check on the node
The metric is viewed together with the neighboring ones — on its own any number means little:
pmta show status
pmta show queues --sort=rcpt --maxitems=20
The first prints all node metrics at once. The second breaks down by queue what the first gives as one number — and that is usually where you can see which queue made it up.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇Third-party components of the enginePowerMTA runs on five third-party libraries — PCRE, OpenSSL, ICU, gumbo-parser and prometheus-cpp; their behavior is determined by the engine build.◇Accept, route, deliverA message’s path inside the node: accept, decide where, deliver — and all the settings live between these three steps.◇The activation key is a prerequisite for installation, not a step after itWithout an activation key from SparkPost support the engine neither installs nor runs, and the license tier sets the outbound connection ceiling: on Standard everything above 200 is ignored.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Configuration lifecycle · Prepare a node for sending