messages building up

[Julian Field]

At 14:02 14/02/2003, you wrote:
>Hallo all
>
>I have a server here that is under fairly high load.
>My problem is that the messages seem to keep on building up in the mque.in
>directory.
>Now I have set the Max Children = 60

You won't gain anything on a small machine (less than about 8 CPU's) by
giving it a number as high as that. It will just spend all its CPU time
sorting directory entries.

>  as you can see and setup sendmail to
>deque everey 5 mins (sendmail -bd -q15m)

If you specify -bd -q15m then it will bypass MailScanner completely, as it
will be delivering from the same queue it is reading into.

>Any ideas how I can get the performance up ?
>The server is a dual pIII 800 with 3Gigs ram and a raid5 array
>It is running Redhat 7.3 with sendmail (standard) all patches were apllied
>with up2date.
>Mailscanner is Version 4.12-2 installed from rpm's
>using f-prot

I am about to try switching ext3 to data journalling. Note that you can
also increase the performance quite a bit by putting the
MailScanner/incoming directory on a tmpfs filesystem. MailScanner does a
lot of file i/o to the MailScanner/incoming dir, and this hammers real
disks quite hard. I have personally seen 30% speed improvement by doing
this. It only takes a minute to change and is definitely worth a try. All
the data in the MailScanner/incoming directory is temporary anyway, so you
don't need to worry about losing anything on power-outs.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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