mailscanner system requirements???

[Antony Stone]

On Wednesday 17 September 2003 1:13 pm, David Vosburgh wrote:

> We've got a Sun 220R with 2x450Mhz processors and 1GB RAM running
> sendmail, MailScanner, SpamAssassin, and Sophos.  We normally average
> about 25k messages per day, and the load average is generally between
> one and three.  During the Sobig outbreak, those numbers jumped up to
> about 30-40k messages per day, and the load average was between about
> three and seven.  The increased load didn't seem to affect the delay
> time though, as we were seeing values in the four to ten second range on
> average.

Indeed.   It's worth bearing in mind that the load average can be a rather
misleading measure of "how close to not coping with any more" a system is.

The load average is, after all, simply the number of processes running
concurrently over some period of time.   If those processes don't take up
much CPU power, then your system can run lots of them without having a
problem.

I generally regard load average as a threshold measurement - if it's below 10
then I'm happy (it's usually below 1, but getting up to 10 is okay); if it
gets as high as 20 then I'm concerned, and I like to keep an eye on it in
between those.

As illustrated above, a machine which usually runs at LA=1-3 can increase to
LA=3-7 (a doubling or tripling) without the efficiency or effectiveness of
the processing being carried out necessarily being affected.   It just means
the machine is doing more processing - it doesn't indicate it's close to the
limit of what it can achieve.

Regards,

Antony.

--

In Heaven, the police are British, the chefs are Italian, the beer is
Belgian, the mechanics are German, the lovers are French, the entertainment
is American, and everything is organised by the Swiss.

In Hell, the police are German, the chefs are British, the beer is American,
the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the entertainment is Belgian,
and everything is organised by the Italians.