Mail queue is backing up - processor is idling

[Julian Field]

I'm going to publish the production release of Version 4 "Real Soon Now",
this will solve the problem.

Otherwise I would guess that, as you are using SpamAssassin as well, you
have slow DNS resolving happening. As a result your box is spending most of
its time waiting for DNS responses. You can improve this by pointing it at
a local caching nameserver if you haven't done that already. And switching
off SpamAssassin will speed things up quite a bit.

At 16:09 18/10/2002, you wrote:
>   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!

--
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