Performance question

[Alan Fiebig]

Hello,

I'm currently running MS 4.23-11 with SA 2.55, Bayes disabled, RBL disabled, no offsite checks (pyzor etc.) in use.
Sendmail is my MTA.

I am using tmpfs for my MailScanner/incoming directory.

On occasion I get BIG backups in my mqueue.in

When this happens, MS is indeed processing messages, but exceedingly slowly. But yet my server seems to have
tons of resources available, the server is not running out of steam. Rather, most of my MS children are sleeping.

here is an example:
TOP shows 17 MailScanners sleeping, 1 running
uptime shows CPU usage of 1.86%, 3.38%, 5.78%
Zero swap space is in use
Approx 1GB of RAM is inuse, 200KB RAM free
80% CPU idle time

9,000 messages are in mqueue.in
902 in MailScanner/incoming

Watching the log shows no timeouts, and over an 18 minute period the server processed 2,200 messages, or 7,300/hour, 176k/day
As we receive closer to 250,000/day, this just doesn't cut it. Yet I see no indication that faster or more hardware would
have any impact considering the server is basically resting.

Any ideas? Thanks!

-Alan