Anecdote: My life with mailscanner (so far)

[Gillis, Mark]

Greetings again.  In the past, I had a few questionable experiences with
MailScanner, in regards to our environment.  It just was not keeping up with
the workload... that's more understandable now.

We have 19000 users, and process about 300,000 messages per day, the vast
majority of which are inbound.  Most of that is spam, as well.

All of this running on one large Compaq Tru64 Unix box was too much for
MailScanner -- it was too much for one server!

We have now separated smtp and pop onto separate servers, and are only
scanning outbound messages.  MailScanner is processing about 22,000 messages
per day on the outbound server, and is keeping up quite happily.

One issue I still have is a poser:  last night, MailScanner just up and
puked, reporting (to the console, not to syslogd) "Out of memory!".  I
fiddled with mailscanner.conf, to no avail.  None of the messages in
mqueue.in were grossly large, biggest being about 250K.  But it would not
run.  Finally, I had to stop sendmail, mv mqueue.in mqueue.test, mkdir
mqueue.in, restart sendmail, and restart mailscanner.  It has been running
since without a hiccup.

I still have the files in mqueue.test, trying to deduce what caused the out
of memory error.  Anybody else seen something like this?


_____________________________________________
Mark Gillis
Sr. Systems Administrator
HORRY TELEPHONE COOPERATIVE, INC. (HTC)
INFORMATION SERVICES
3480 Highway 701 North
Conway, SC 29526
843.369.8145
mark.gillis at htcinc.net




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