Too many MailScanners Spawned

[Jim Levie]

On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 23:15, Matthew Davis wrote:
> Using MailScanner-4.02-3 RPM install, and default .conf sets
>
> Max Children = 5
>
> <rant>
> Which might be good for some, but for my slow 300 mhz + 32 meg RAM mail server, having 5 MailScanners running means I could have 5 spamd's running.  Which the load of 1 is plenty of load.  Anyway, a batch of mabye 20 or so emails came in and it took maybe 30 minutes to process them.
> </rant>
>
> Enough of rambling, I tried to set Max Children = 1, but it still loads 2 copies of MailScanner.
>
What you are seeing is the "master" MailScanner process and the child it
creates to do the actual scanning. The only things that the master does
is to manage its children, so other than the memory it uses it won't
load down your system.

The nicest thing that you could do for this box would be to give it more
memory. If you could get the installed memory into the 96Mb+ range
(assuming that you aren't running X routinely) you'd see an improvement
if the performance of the system. Given that mail scanning involves a
fair bit of disk I/O, you could then profitably run 2-4 children. The
scanners will tend to interleave in their use of I/O and disk, resulting
in faster overall message processing.
--
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed
RedHat.