Performance Drop?

[Max Kipness]

>>I've noticed a severe drop in performance as of late. One thing to note
>>is that when looking through the log there will generally be up to 40
>>messages being batched together. In the past I remember there just being
>>a couple. There are two things that I can think of that may be causing
>>the problem but wanted to confirm.

After looking back on some previous posts, It seems that my problem may be SpamAssassin timing out. There are many, many instances in the log of it timing out. I guess I didn't realize that MailScanner kept attempting to process after a timeout.

Any suggestions here? I'm using DCC and I think using RBLs in SpamAssassin. If you have the setting 'skip_rbl_checks 1' commented, does that mean that you ARE using RBLs through SpamAssassin? And does SpamAssassin already have the list of RBLs configured based on rules? Well, I tested commenting the rbl line in SpamAssassin and it didn't stop the poor performance. Could it be DCC?

Any other checks to do?

>>1. Does it effect performance by having too many entries in the
>>blacklist? Currently I have 950 and it's growing as I've allowed users
>>to blacklist through an automated mailer script.

>This will affect it, yes. Best way is to suck in the blacklist addresses
>into a hash table somehow, maybe by using the per-domain and per-user white
>and black-list support provided in CustomConfig.pm.

Well, I'd really like to keep the blacklist global. What do you mean by hash? Based on my SpamAssasin timeouts, this may not even be a performance issue.

Also, regarding hardware, would adding more email help with the large blacklist? I've got 512mb currently, and it seems like around 500mb is always in use according to TOP. 

Thanks,
Max