very urgent problem with MailScanner + postfix

[David Vosburgh]

I had a different message - "SpamAssassin timed out and was killed,
consecutive failure 1 of 20", but the same general problem (extreme
slowness delivering mail).  My actual problem turned out to be an
ex-user that was forwarding corporate email to a hotmail account that
had hit it's quota. His email was getting bounced back and forth,
growing all the time.  After we changed his alias to /dev/null and
restarted MS, the queue cleared very quickly.  I've since reduced the
number of messages scanned in one pass, Max Unscanned/Unsafe Messages
Per Scan, from 30 (default) to 10.  FWIW, it does appear that my system
(Sun 220R w/ 2x450Mhz,1GB RAM) is "happier" with this setting.

Dave

Ron E. wrote:

>Great, thanks Dave - yes I just found Monkeys still in my RBL list so I'll
>check further but just based on that my performance has gone way up
>already.
>
>Did you also have the problem with duplicate truncated messages being
>delivered? And messages in the maillog about messages "still being
>delivered"?
>
>
>-Ron
>
>On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, David Vosburgh wrote:
>
>
>
>>I had a similar problem several weeks ago.  I'd first take a look at
>>your mail log file for signs of any delays while running MS.  In my
>>particular case, there were SA timeouts during MS processing.  If you
>>want to jump the gun, you could just disable SA in the mailscanner
>>config file, restart MS, and see if things speed up.  If it is SA, then
>>turn on debugging to see where things are slowing down.  You should look
>>at the various net checks going on there (razor/pyzor/dcc and any
>>RBL's).  You could selectively disable each one at a time in the
>>spam.assassin.prefs.conf file to see which one is causing problems.
>> Also, several RBL's have gone out of business in the last few
>>months...you should make sure you aren't using them.
>>
>>Dave
>>
>>Ron E. wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hopefully someone will see this very shortly.
>>>
>>>Several days ago I posted a message about the same problem where
>>>mailscanner begins to backlog and errors about messages "still being
>>>delivered" show up in the maillog, with hardly any messages passed by
>>>mailscanner to the mta.
>>>
>>>I've since upgraded to 4.24-5 due to a backlog starting to happen again
>>>but it never cleared up and is unfortunately much worse this time - (much
>>>larger backlog).
>>>
>>>I've temporarily stopped the incoming postfix to give mailscanner a chance
>>>to catch up, but need some debugging here to get the backlog cleared out
>>>as fast as possible and to fully fix this...
>>>
>>>Any help would be appreciated.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>
>>>
>>>Ron
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>--
>>
>>Dave Vosburgh
>>Sr. Unix System Administrator
>>Dallas Semiconductor
>>vosburgh at dalsemi.com  972-371-4418
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>