Major Load please help

[Kevin Spicer]

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 17:36, Vicchiullo, Rob wrote:
> Here's another weird thing.
> If I activate any RBL inside MailScanner.conf the load jumps 2 more so
> form 5 to 7 constant.
> Also in the maillog I get the following errors:
> Apr 23 12:35:50 cathy.bmts.com MailScanner[13079]: RBL Check spamcop.net
> timed out and was killed, consecutive failure 1 of 7
> Apr 23 12:35:54 cathy.bmts.com MailScanner[12687]: RBL Check SBL+XBL
> timed out and was killed, consecutive failure 1 of 7

If you are actually blocking with RBL's then you will be better off
doing this in your MTA (since then it will be rejected off hand without
MailScanner even having to touch it).
Take a look at what actions you are asking MailScanner to perform.
Anything that modifies the message body is expensive (header
modification is less so). Particularly turn off things like signing
clean message bodies, don't use the attachment action or strip actions
for spam if you can help it (thats not general advice, just a way of
helping out a busy server).  Basically try to avoid changing the message
itself.

In terms of children and batch sizes your spec (you did say 2G ram?)
should cope okay with the default number of children [my opinion, others
may differ] but its often worth reducing the size of the batches to
around 20-30 (Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan).  Its different for every
system, so try different batch sizes and numbers of children until you
get the best setting.

On name resolution, you need a caching nameserver as others have pointed
out.  I've also heard of performance problems in the past caused by the
name service cache daemon (nscd) on Solaris.  It may be worth disabling
it once you have a caching nameserver in place [I don't think this
causes problems, but I'd suggest testing on another system or at least
googling for advice, as I'm speaking from memory]







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