Auto-restarting once a day via cron?

[kwest]

I posted this a few weeks ago:

Discourse stopped polling my POP3 server

Hello, I run a Discourse server at Digital Ocean which polls our incoming email address at a cPanel-based shared hosting provider to retrieve messages to post to Discourse. It’s generally worked very well for a couple of years, but stopped working yesterday - the mailbox received an email yesterday at 3:44 pm, and that DID get picked up by our DO Discourse instance, but three emails that came in shortly after that are not getting picked up. (The emails appear in the shared host’s cPanel Email p…

Since then, we had an incident where Discourse didn’t receive incoming emails for five days: On April 1, it picked up 2 incoming emails promptly, but then failed to pick up the 4 incomingn email posts that came in on 4/2 and 4/3. Then, on 4/5, for unknown reasons, the log shows

Job exception: -ERR [SYS/TEMP] Server shutting down.

and the next day it started retrieving emails from our POP mailbox again (although, again, with sporadic slowness - it’s set to check the mailbox every few minutes, but sometimes it retrieves new messages within a few minutes, and sometimes it takes a few hours).

Might it help to try restarting Discourse once a day using a cron job? This is a low volume community with just a few posts a day (usually 5-10 posts a day), but most members receive posts via email and everyone wants the emailed posts to go out promptly.

So:

Would restarting Discourse once a day be good for the app, or bad, or neither?

Anything else I could try to get Discourse to grab our POP messages more frequently?

Thanks!

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@kwest

Job exception: -ERR [SYS/TEMP] Server shutting down.

This is not a Discourse issue. That is an error message coming from your POP3 server. You should address this with your shared hosting cPanel provider.

It would be even better to set up direct delivery incoming email Configure direct-delivery incoming email for self-hosted sites with Mail-Receiver

[kwest]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the helpful reply.

Is the “Server shutting down” coming from my POP server? I figured it was coming from the Digital Ocean droplet. (I just took another look at the error logs and sure enough, the backtrace shows POP3Command#check_response . Huh.)

Thanks for that helpful link to direct-delivery incoming email - I think I thought that’s what I was doing, but apparently not. I’m a little leery of the complexities of trying to properly set up incoming and outgoing when all other incoming mail needs to go to the cPanel, but it’s a good suggestion and maybe I will give it a try.

Thanks so much for the helpful info!

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@kwest

Is the “Server shutting down” coming from my POP server?

Yes

@kwest

of the complexities of trying to properly set up incoming and outgoing when all other incoming mail needs to go to the cPanel

I’m not 100% sure of your setup but it’s easiest to have your @example.com directed to your cPanel and use @forum.example.com for your forum.