Batch sizes?

[mikea]

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 10:39:43PM +0100, Tim Bishop wrote:
> What do people think is a sensible batch size?
>
> I notice the default is 100 - but my feeling is this is a little too
> high if you're doing spamassassin and RBL checks. My system took a fair
> while to process that many in one go this morning - they also got mostly
> taken by the first MailScanner process, leaving the others mostly idle.
>
> So is it better to do doing small but quick batches? or is it better
> to do larger but longer batches? The latter results in quite a delay on
> the mail... whilst at least the former gives a reassuring trickle :-)

I'm doing batches of 25. My current MailScanner machine is really
RAM-starved (FreeBSD 4.3, 233 MHz, 64 MBytes), and larger batches
just churn and churn forever. I realize that this means I eat all
the overhead of starting the proceses that much more frequently,
but that appears to be survivable.

Maybe we need to work on a tuning guide for MS, and for SA under MS?

--
Mike Andrews
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin since 1964