messages building up

[Julian Field]

At 21:47 14/02/2003, you wrote:
>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?

Yes, this has been reported to this list before. Also, McAfee has problems
with soft-links. I strongly recommend testing before rolling out production
servers with any new software.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support