Anecdote: My life with mailscanner (so far)

[Julian Field]

At 15:53 07/08/2002, you wrote:
>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!

Supporting 19k users 300k messsages per day and all their POP requests on 1
server!!!
No wonder it couldn't cope...

I would do it with at least 3: 1 for inbound, 1 for outbound and 1 for POP,
as an *absolute minimum*.

Only MailScanning outbound mail is a very odd setup, you really should be
scanning at least incoming mail for virus protection.

>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.

Try reducing the max size of a message batch. How much memory has your
Compaq box got? And I hope you are running MailTools-5.411a and not any of
the 5.5 series (which the author acknowledges have massive memory leaks).

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

Nope, never seen that.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ