Whats your config like..

[David Lancaster]

Just a thought, how good is your IO configuration?
We had a SunOS mailserver get bunged up by a slew of spam, and the
combination of a slow scsi disk for the mailqueue, and the problem that
FFS/UFS has with directories with a large number of files caused a massive
IO wait problem...

Faster disk and some liberal pruning of spam mails that were sitting in
the queue fixed things right up...  Similar to your situation, moving the
bouncing email out of the queue allowed it to keep up with new incoming
mail just fine, the disk is a just a future precaution.

Mind you, this was without sendmail alone, without mailscanner...

D.

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Kelly Hamlin wrote:

> heres something strange.. :)
> i had about 7000 messages in my outgoing queue and most have been there 2-4
> days, i let sendmail run for 30 minutes without acceptning any new
> connections, then removed all the outgoing queue, and now its keeping up..
> What else is wierd, my secondary machine, only has about 1500 in its
> outgoing queue (mainly undelioverable stuff) and it keeps running good..
>
> Didnt make sense to me, so im posting to let ya know, but i appriciate your
> input about your config.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Quentin Campbell" <Q.G.Campbell at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK>
> To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 12:21 PM
> Subject: Re: Whats your config like..
>
>
> Kelly
>
> Ideally you want to be running two or more boxes of the same type as MX
> hosts for your domain(s). If each MX host has the same precedence value
> in the MX record then they should implicitly load share via DNS
> round-robin selection.
>
> Quentin
> ---
> PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Computing Service, University of Newcastle
> FAX:   +44 191 222 8765    Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, NE1 7RU.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Any opinion expressed above is mine. The University can get its own."
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Kelly Hamlin [mailto:fizz at bomb.net]
> > Sent: 25 April 2002 17:12
> > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: Re: Whats your config like..
> >
> >
> > I do have a second box setup to be a secondary MX with no
> > child limit. Ive got a couple p3 800's laying around, im
> > gonna see if i cant make use of these.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Quentin Campbell" <Q.G.Campbell at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK>
> > To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> > Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 10:45 AM
> > Subject: Re: Whats your config like..
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Kelly Hamlin [mailto:fizz at bomb.net]
> > > Sent: 25 April 2002 13:28
> > > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > > Subject: Whats your config like..
> > >
> > >
> > > Im running a  Dual 266 / 512 Megs Ram, on Slackware 8.0
> > > I process anywhere between 25 and 35 thousand emails a day.
> > >
> > > My question to you is.. What is your setup like and how
> > many emails do
> > > you process?
> > >
> > > Reason im curious is for the last 4 days ive come in to about 10k
> > > messages queued up. Its like it just stops working. If i
> > disable spam
> > > checks it will clear the queue within about an hour, but
> > what i wanna
> > > know is how i can keep it running fast, even with spam
> > checks as our
> > > customers have grown to love this feature.
> >
> > Kelly
> >
> > You need more and faster boxes! Two dual 1GHz processor Linux
> > boxes with 1GB or 2GB of memory should cope with that load
> > and some to spare. If the two boxes are MX'd to your mail
> > domain(s) then you also have some resiliance should a server fail.
> >
> > This site handles more than 90K incoming messages a day. If
> > you also count outgoing email then our Mail Hubs handle more
> > than 200K incoming/outgoing messages a day.
> >
> > With just MailScanner + McAfee AV software running, we could
> > cope with that message load shared across 4 x Sun SPARC
> > Ultra-5 boxes running Solaris 7 and sendmail. These have
> > 266MHz (approx) CPUs and 384MB memory.
> >
> > Two of the four Mail Hubs are significantly busier than the
> > others and we could not run SpamAssassin on these two without
> > building up large backlogs and even refusing incoming
> > connections at peak times. For this reason we had to disable
> > the use of SpamAssassin.
> >
> > Like you we wanted to run SpamAssassin. The solution was to
> > replace each of the four Sun boxes with dual 1GHz Intel
> > processor boxes (2GB memory). We run RedHat Linux 7.2 in
> > place of Solaris. I simply recompiled our existing sendmail
> > under Linux and run it with the existing sendmail.cf file.
> > Building the Redhat system and installing MailScanner, McAfee
> > software and SpamAssassin was easier than when working with Solaris!
> >
> > For key infrastructure servers I would always recommend using
> > RAID; in our case we mirror all disks (RAID 1). Each server
> > has 4 disks providing a mirrored set of 2 disks; the first is
> > used as the system disk + sendmail log disk + local
> > applications disk while the second disk of the set is the
> > sendmail spool disk.
> >
> > I hope this info is of some help.
> >
> > Quentin
> > ---
> > PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Computing Service, University of Newcastle
> > FAX:   +44 191 222 8765    Newcastle upon Tyne, United
> > Kingdom, NE1 7RU.
> > --------------------------------------------------------------
> > ----------
> > "Any opinion expressed above is mine. The University can get its own."
> >
>



===========================================================
David Lancaster
ITS ESS