Re: [hylafax-users] Batch Mode

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

moritz winterberg wrote:

> while testing once I submitted several faxes with the same destination
> to the hylafax server. They got queued as expected but after a certain
> period got added into batches. Since I've no clue about batch mode and
> this behaviour seems to have strange interaction with my capi4hylafax
> wrapper script I'd like to know more about it.
> Could someone give me a hint about what batch mode exactly is about or
> point me to some good documentation.

The configuration parameters (BatchLogs and MaxBatchJobs) are documented 
in the hylafax-config man page:

 http://hylafax.sourceforge.net/man/hylafax-config.php

The "supportsBatching" dest info option is found in the hylafax-info man 
page:

 http://hylafax.sourceforge.net/man/hylafax-info.php

There is a very short mention of batching in the faxsend man page:

 http://hylafax.sourceforge.net/man/faxsend.php

It is probably the most relevant for the sake of the wrapper (that 
faxsend can be invoked with multiple sendq files named).  However, if 
capi4hylafax is to support batching in the fax protocol, then these 
Bugzilla reports should be good reference:

 http://bugs.hylafax.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118
 http://bugs.hylafax.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=625
 http://bugs.hylafax.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=667

As far as understanding how fax batching is performed in faxq, I have 
posted a few relevant messages to this list on that, but they're 
probably not completely accurate... so let me just briefly say what happens.

As the time-to-send arrives for a queued job faxq will proceed through 
the list of all jobs on the run queue as well as the jobs in the blocked 
queue as well as the jobs in the sleeping queue.  Any of those jobs that 
are destined to the same destination as the first job will be "batched" 
(up to the MaxBatchJobs amount).  Some consideration is made to 
priorities in competing jobs to different destinations (so that they 
don't go ignored due to batching), and it should be sensible, but I 
can't remember it enough to explain it.  When the entire batch is 
assembled then faxsend is invoked with a list of the jobs.  The fax 
protocol used in faxsend is to separate the jobs as different 
"documents" using the EOM signal.

If the batched job fails then the jobs are separated and returned to the 
queue with new (and possibly different) times-to-send.  Because batching 
pulls from the sleeping queue they will likely be batched on any retries 
(provided that the failure did not trigger supportsBatching:false)... 
only they'll probably be shuffled-up a little bit.

Lee.

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