OT: SA Timeout Issues

[mikea]

On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 10:55:46AM +0200, Raymond Dijkxhoorn wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > May 21 12:35:48 deep-thought MailScanner[16314]: SpamAssassin timed out
> > and was killed, consecutive failure 19 of 20
> >
> > I've left the default timeout settings along, and until last night,
> > they've been perfectly fine. (SpamAssassin Timeout = 30)
>
> I had the same, most likely the SA servers are a little bit busy, since
> response times are strange, sometimes it times out, sometimes 2-4sec.
> I put the setting to 40 and its ok here now.

CAUTION: Shell scripts ahead. based on the FreeBSD shell "sh". If you
run Linux, or something other than sendmail, you may have to adjust
the location of the mail log in the scripts, or to fiddle with them in
other ways.

I tend to have an instance of this running on my MailScanner box,
so that I can see what's having trouble:

while (true)
        do
        clear
        grep -i "timed" /var/log/maillog|tail -50
                echo timedout
        sleep 15
        clear
        done

Also


while (true)
        do
        clear
        grep -i waiting /var/log/maillog|tail -50
        echo waitcount
        sleep 15
        clear
        done

and

while (true)
        do
        clear
        grep -i "scanning" /var/log/maillog|tail -50
        echo scancount
        sleep 15
        clear
        done

and

while (true)
        do
        clear
        grep -i "message accepted" /var/log/maillog|tail -50
        echo mailaccepted
        sleep 15
        clear
        done

so that with four screens I get a clear and unambiguous view of how
well things are going:

What's timing out, how frequently, and when it last did so;
How much mail is waiting to be processed;
How big the batches are over the last several minutes; and
If MailScanner is actually sending mail on to the inbound server.

I have tried this:

while (true)
        do
        clear
        grep -i -f mailgrep /var/log/maillog|tail -50
        echo showmail
        sleep 15
        clear
        done

with mailgrep containing

# mailgrep -- used by ~/bin/showmail
timed
waiting
scanning
message accepted

to provide a combined display, but it is just too busy.

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