Message Batches

[Steve Freegard]

Hi All,

I've been running MailScanner site-wide for 8 days now, with huge success -
however I've had a strange problem today.

I had a problem with the update-virus-scanners script (which I'm still
looking into) which resulted in a queue of around 50 messages waiting in
/var/spool/mqueue.in.

Once I'd sorted the problem, I restarted MailScanner which started
processing the queue - however I noticed that it was taking a long time to
process this backlog (with new messages going through straight away), upon
investigation by doing a 'fuser *' in /var/spool/mqueue.in, I realised that
one of the MailScanner children had picked up all 50+ messages and was
running them through the various SA tests, RBL, Bayes etc. which took a
while.

It got me thinking - would it not be more efficient for each child to work
to the batch size using the following:  total messages in queue/max number
of children = batch size per child - which would clear the queue more
efficiently???

Or - do I have something incorretly configured?? - I'm running MS 4.20-3 +
SA 2.54 on RedHat 9 + Sendmail.

TIA,
Steve.
--
Steve Freegard
Systems Manager
Littlehampton Book Services Ltd.

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