MS Performance

[Matt Laney]

Andrea,

> Tried that [tmpfs] but it doesn't seem to help. I've put another 128 MB
> of RAM to a total of 256MB. With or without tmpfs I can get a maximum of
> 1.72 scanned messages per second (103 msg/min). It seems to be a limit
> of the CPU and not of the RAM.
>
> Could someone confirm or confute this?


How are you measuring performance?  Is 'top' of any help in showing
whether things are processor bound or memory bound or otherwise?


I get similar performance on a dual Pentium 3 550Mhz with 1G RAM, slow
SCSI disks, no tmpfs, sophos, with spam checks on...or at least I think
I do, if the logs provide a decent measure.  Here's a fragment from mine:

Jul 5 21:38:43 ...: New Batch: Scanning 22 messages, 75339 bytes
Jul 5 21:38:43 ...: Spam Checks: Starting
Jul 5 21:38:57 ...: Virus and Content Scanning: Starting
Jul 5 21:38:58 ...: Uninfected: Delivered 22 messages

It seems that the spam scans are taking roughly forever (with all that
DNS activity, I'm not surprised) while the virus scans are moving very
quickly...if the logs are to be believed on matters of timing.


According to 'top', my load averages are kinda low, like .50 most of
the time.  MailScanner never shows up as eating more than 10% of the
accounted-for CPU time.

Smells like network lag on the RBLs to me...


-Matt


--
Matt Laney, mdlaney at morehouse.edu
Network and Unix Systems Engineer
Morehouse College --- Atlanta, GA