Mail queue is backing up - processor is idling

[Dale Lovelace]

  Hi,

  I've installed the mailscanner-3.24-1 RPM on a fresh Red Hat 8.0 installation. I am using the spamassassin-2.31-16 RPM that came with RH8.0. We have a very high volume mail server. My mail queue is getting backed up horribly right now. I have 4000 mails in /var/spool/mqueue.in/ waiting for mailscanner to scan them, but top shows the load average at around .20 and the cpu is 96% idle. 

  My question is how to make mailscanner put more load on the server and speed up mail processing. I am using Delivery Method = queue and running the sendmail delivery queue at 1m like it says in the FAQ. This box has no local delivery, so adding a local sendmail cron wouldn't do me any good.

  I tried modifying my /usr/local/Mailscanner/bin/check_mailscanner to this:

echo Starting virus scanner...
nice -20 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/MailScanner/bin/mailscanner $config

and it seems to have helped some, but I still have massive cpu idle time.

  I have noticed that it seems the number of mails in the queue stay the same for several minutes, then 100 or so of them will get moved. I am assuming that mailscanner scans a batch, then moves them all at the same time.

  I am trying to replace a Windows based mail relay server, and Linux running slower than Windows is pretty embarrassing. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

  Thanks in advance!
  Dale

Dale Lovelace
System Administrator
hotels.com