System load very high

[Julian Field]

At 21:00 20/05/2003, you wrote:
>Ok.  I finally got the load under control but I had to comment
>out the "Spam List" line, eliminating RBL checks and
>turn off SpamAssassin checking to do so.   I put rbl checks
>into the incoming sendmail to reduce spam somewhat.
>If I turn on either of these options the load starts to climb
>and time-out messages begin to appear in the log in just
>a few minutes and with only a few messages in mqueue.in.
>
>Does this give anyone any more ideas?

You might have slow DNS lookups. What hardware have you got and how many
messages per day are you trying to process? SpamAssassin is pretty CPU
intensive, but you can get large load values out of network waits too, the
load average is based on the number of jobs in the run-queue at any time,
but that doesn't mean they actively want CPU.


>Thanks-again,
>Dan
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Dan Leavitt" <dll at SCITOOLS.COM>
>To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
>Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 9:47 AM
>Subject: Re: System load very high
>
>
> > Nah, it definately wan't sendmail.   There were 150 files
> > in mqueue.in and nothing in mqueue and, when I
> > reluctantly stopped MS, started sendmail and moved
> > the files from mqueue.in to mqueue, sendmail delivered
> > all in seconds - most, if not all, were for local delivery.
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Joan Bryan" <joan.bryan at KCL.AC.UK>
> > To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 9:43 AM
> > Subject: Re: System load very high
> >
> >
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > We had a problem whereby when the load average went very high (not
> > > due to  mailscanner and we don't run spamassassin yet) sendmail
> > > processed entries in the mail queues intermittently. Once the QueueLA
> > > parameter, which controls the level of Load Average at which sendmail
> > > stops processing, was adjusted in the sendmail config file this
> > > cleared the problem for us.
> > >
> > > HTH
> > >
> > > Joan
> > > ----------------------
> > > Joan Bryan
> > > Unix Systems Administrator
> > > Information Systems
> > > mailto:joan.bryan at kcl.ac.uk
> > >
> >

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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