Any one else notice...

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Hi,

   I'll weigh in on this thread too.  Last Monday, I moved our mail service
to a Sun E220R, 2 cpus, running Solaris 8.  I'm running mailscanner with
spamassassin turned on.  I have all of the "Spam List" options in
mailscanner.conf commented out.  I have Spamcop assigned a non-zero score
in spamassassin, so I hope/think SA is using spamcop (I'm not sure yet).
We use RBL+ in sendmail, and we subscribe to it transfer mode, so RBL+
mail gets rejected before getting to mailscanner.  I have the delivery
mode in mailscanner set to "queue".  We use Sophos.  We process roughly
20K messages a day.  Result:  the system works great, no slowdowns, no
clogged queues, nothing but bliss.  Julian should be knighted, IMHO.

   Most of what I see in this thread sounds like DNS slowdowns.  Here's
my advice:

  * run a modern version bind on your mail server, at least in caching mode,
    to handle the DNS lookups for you.  If you use RBL+ or other zone-transfer
    mode DNS blocklists, do the zone transfers to the mail server, so
    DNS queries never leave the box for RBL+.  You will probably have to
    pay money to get zone transfers.  As a part of running bind on your mail
    server, make sure /etc/resolv.conf is configured so that the first entry
    is the external interface (not loopback) of the mail server.  Here is my
    resolv.conf for my server, emerald:

domain colby.edu
nameserver 137.146.210.52   # emerald, this host, not loopback -- for RBL+
nameserver 137.146.210.46   # opal
nameserver 137.146.210.45   # ruby
nameserver 139.140.1.1      # polar.bowdoin.edu
nameserver 204.70.128.1     # ns.cw.net

    Any DNS lookup on emerald goes to the local cache first, then other
    local machines, then remotely.

*   Have lots of memory in the machine for named to use.  Named is using
    about 140 MB of resident memory on my machine right now.  If you are
    using bind 9.X (you should be) and have a multi-cpu machine, let bind
    run threads on all cpus.

*   If you are doing DNS spam-blocking, do it in sendmail.  Reject the
    stuff before it gets to mailscanner or spamassassin.

*   Comment out some the "Spam List" lookups in mailscanner and see if
    that helps.  Fewer DNS lookups, especially to a remote site that is
    overloaded (like relays.ordb.org perhaps), may be a bottleneck.  Likewise,
    check the config for SA and try to control DNS lookups there too.

*   If you are running Solaris, shut off nscd!!  This code is a real
    DNS bottleneck for a system doing beaucoup lookups.  When we first
    moved our Apache web server to Sun, we were getting glacial response
    times to webpage requests.  I found a technote at the Apache site about
    nscd problems.  Turned it off, and things ran fast after that.
    The same advice applies to other Solaris apps doing massive DNS,
    and nscd could appear on other versions of UNIX.  Let bind do the
    work instead.

Of course our students are gone right now.  The system could blow up when
they return next Fall.

** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D                         PHONE: 207-872-3659
** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology    EMAIL: jaearick at colby.edu
** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,               FAX: 207-872-3076
** Waterville ME, 04901-8842
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