A performance upgrade

[Furnish, Trever G]

<sigh> Mix of top-quoting and bottom quoting - painful. :-)

Who said anything about putting stuff other than "working" files into tmpfs?
My assumption (and that's all it is, at this point) would be that MS puts
its copy of the message into incoming (which we all agree is safe  to keep
in tmpfs), and that *if* SA routines cause files to be put into /tmp (a big
"if", in my mind), then those files are derived from the file MS keeps in
the incoming directory.  And as such, those files are also safe to lose in
the event of a system crash.

Having not checked through the code at all, nor profiled a running MS/SA
process, I have no idea whether MailScanner's use of the SA modules causes
files to be created in /tmp, but IF it does (as Lindsay's post suggests),
then it seems reasonable (IMO) to speed things up by creating those files in
some other location that can be mounted as tmpfs instead.

I bet someone reading this is a lot more certain than I am about whether
MS+SA even results in files in any location other than the incoming
directory - sure would be nice to hear from that person. :-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Swaney [mailto:steve.swaney at FSL.COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 6:30 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: A performance upgrade
>
>
> Isn't this a bit dangerous?
>
> If the system crashes, you'll lose everything (real email) in
> the outbound
> (local delivery queue). This is not the case with putting
> MailScanner's
> "work directory" on a tmpfs since if the system crashes; the
> incoming queue
> will still have the file waiting to be picked up by
> MailScanner, since I
> believe that MailScanner does not delete the incoming files
> until the write
> to outbound spool is flushed to disk :)
>
> (Creative punctuation is my own :))
>
> Steve
>
> Stephen Swaney
> Fortress Systems Ltd.
> steve.swaney at fsl.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list
> [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
> Of Furnish, Trever G
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 5:27 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: A performance upgrade
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Lindsay Snider [mailto:lindsay at pa.net]
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 3:42 PM
> > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: Re: A performance upgrade
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday 11 November 2003 14:35, Kevin Spicer wrote:
> > >
> > > The single best performance tweak is to put the MailScanner work
> > > directory into tmpfs.  See todays thread 'tmpfs' for details.
> >
> > I noticed spamassassin also writes each email it scans to a
> > file in /tmp.  Has
> > anyone had any luck changing where spamassassin writes it's
> > temp files to?
> > It'd be nice to put them on tmpfs as well (w/o putting all of
> > /tmp on tmpfs).
> >
> > Looking through SA's source, it looks like you have to set an
> > environmental
> > variable.  I tried setting the variable in
> > /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner and
> > /etc/rc.d/init.d/MailScanner but in both cases, environmental
> > variables get
> > wiped in the spawned version of MailScanner.
>
> I have wondered the same thing, so I'd be very interested in
> whatever you
> discover.
>
> What's the name of the env variable?
>
> When you say you tried setting it in the init script, did you
> remember to
> export it?
>
> --
> Trever
>