Performance question

[Stephe Campbell]

I don't claim to be a very good sysadmin, and don't understand all on the
top and vmstat stuff, so take this with a grain of salt.

I noticed that mailscanner-mrtg was hogging a lot of my resources, and after
investigating a little further, noticed that it seemed I always had multiple
instances of processes running the same test. I was also getting messages
about mrtg lock files present whenever it kicked off, meaning that the last
mrtg hadn't finished. So I upped the time between mailscanner-mrtg from 5
minutes to 10 minutes. I don't really know for sure if this has helped over
the long run, but something has cleaned up my mess of backlogged mails in
both incoming and outgoing since I did this.

Taking notice, though, I find that mailscanner-mrtg still uses a lot of
resources, but now it is only doing it once every 10 minutes instead of
multiple times every 5 minutes. Reading the maillog multiple times every
occurrence of running mailscanner-mrtg, especially since I only rotate my
maillog once a week, became more of a burden as the week went on.

The one thing I can't explain, though, is why my incoming queue count
usually grew on Monday or Tuesday, and not particularly the rest of the week
when the maillog was at it's largest size. Maybe Monday is when most of the
stuff came in? Anyway....

Just my thoughts on what I have done.

Steve Campbell
campbell at cnpapers.com
Charleston Newspapers