Anecdote: My life with mailscanner (so far)

[Gillis, Mark]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 12:43 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Anecdote: My life with mailscanner (so far)
>
>
>
> Supporting 19k users 300k messsages per day and all their POP
> requests on 1
> server!!!
> No wonder it couldn't cope...

That's what I said!  Management just needed to be convinced of that...

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

We are going there.  I plan to have 2 smtp and 2 pop, each clustered
together.  I inherited this design, so I'll need to do some convincing on
the need to spend a little bit.

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

Political decision.  We have a large user base, many of whom, it seems, have
never heard of anti-virus outside the context of chicken soup.  Our users
were pouring several thousand virus copies a day into the world.  In order
to become better netizens, we are shutting off the outflow of virus
effluent.  Some other ISP were quite miffed at us, and I could see why.
When we go to 4 servers, we'll scan both in and outbound.


> >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).

Hmm.... this may be something.  I have 512MB on the server, and that should
be adequate (?).  However, the version of MailTools I pulled from CPAN is
1.47.... dated Jul 5 2002.  Is there a later?  Where?

>
> >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.

Hope is that I never will again, either.


> --
> 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
>


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