Performance Drop?

[Julian Field]

At 13:06 14/04/2004, you wrote:
> >>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?

Set
Debug = yes
Debug SpamAssassin = yes
and then kill all your MailScanner processes and run "check_mailscanner".
Press Ctrl-S to pause the output as soon as you see it pause at all. Press
Ctrl-Q to resume the output.

It may be DNS checks, DCC or Razor. Any reference to cloudmark.com is Razor.

> >>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.

No, sounds like your main problem is SA timeouts.

>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.

512Mb is very tight for a busy MailScanner server. Add another 512Mb to it
(memory is cheap these days).
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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