Performance question

[Alan Fiebig]

>Do you get less 'b'locked processes when syslog is off?  Even one blocked
>process is enough for alarm if it sustained.  0/1 and sometimes 3-6 might be
>a little high.  If your processor can stay busy though, then you should be
>fine.

This is interesting...

I have two smtp servers passing mail to my MS server that we have been discussing today.
100% of the messages processed my by MS server come from one of these two smtp servers.

A few minutes ago, to help empty out the big backlog I have (I've got 22,000 emails in
the mqueue.in right now), I bypassed those to smtp servers so they do not send their
email to the MS server.

So, sendmail in and out are still running on the MS server, but there are no messages
coming in to the sendmail receiver. The sendmail deliverer is still sending out
messages as it gets them from MS.

So, having changed nothing on the MS server, having only stopped sending it new messages,
my vmstat 'b' column has dropped to '0' 95% of the time, vmstat 'r' is typically '0' or '1'
and never goes above 4, load is now under 2. TOP shows the CPU idle percentage way up again
over 70%.

So, it appears that with no new messages being received by the sendmail receiver, my server
utilization goes way down... the processor is running all the jobs it has to run, and has
time left over, implying I could actually run more MS children if I wanted to.

It looks like a good percentage of my trouble stems from the act of sendmail getting new
messages and placing them into the mqueue.in.

-Alan