messages building up

[Lindsay Snider]

On Friday 14 February 2003 16:23, you wrote:
> 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.

Has anyone else had problems using tmpfs and f-prot?  If I'm wrong, please 
correct me but It seems that mailscanner depends on the virus scanner to 
recurse down through a directory to scan all the attachments exploded out.  
For some reason, f-prot won't recurse on tmpfs thus the files don't get 
scanned.  Can anyone else verify this?