Increasing MailScanner performance

[Chris Waltham]

Hi guys,

I've got a Linux box (kernel 2.2.19) with dual P3-700s and 512MB of RAM.
We're a small software company (with some web hosting & email stuff thrown
in), around 40 or 50 souls working here. I've noticed that messages sent
through MailScanner have started to take longer and longer to come through,
and some [l]users today have called up and whined to me about it.

What can I do to improve my performance? If I go into /var/spool/mqueue.in
I get this:

root at xxx:/var/spool/mqueue.in# ls | wc -l
     342

I'm running MailScanner 3.20-4 and SpamAssassin 2.20 (I think!), and if it
matters the POP3 daemon I'm using is cucipop. Loads on the machine are
generally pretty low, around 0.05-0.10, though it's been as high as 0.40
today. We're scanning the emails with Sophos 3.57. Oh, I should say we're
using Sendmail too (8.11.2).

Here are some lines from my MailScanner config, let me know if you want to
see more:

Delivery Method = batch
Deliver In Background = yes

Judging from this page
(http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/faq.shtml) I should try setting
Delivery Method to "queue". Our DNS is fine, though. Any ideas?

Here's how I'm starting my Sendmail:

   echo "Starting sendmail daemon (/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd
-ODeliveryMode=queueonly \ -OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue.in)..."
   /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -ODeliveryMode=queueonly
-OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue.in
   echo "Starting sendmail daemon (/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q5m)..."
   /usr/sbin/sendmail -q5m

thanks guys,


Chris

--
Chris Waltham
Systems Administrator
HarvestRoad, Limited.
chris at harvestroad.com
phone: (08) 9338-3000