Performance problems...

[Ugo Bellavance]

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Eric J Merkel [mailto:merkel at METALINK.NET]
> Envoyé : Friday, January 30, 2004 2:49 PM
> À : MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Objet : Performance problems...
> 
> 
> I am in the process of converting our SMTP(sendmail) relay servers to
> MailScanner & F-PROT. Previously we had been using RAV antivirus with
> libmilter to scan all incoming and outgoing emails for 
> viruses. Since moving
> to MailScanner & F-PROT it seems as though my messages are 
> getting back
> logged quite quickly. The server prior to the switch had an 
> average uptime
> of 1.0 - 3.0. Now I am consistantly running at 10.00 - 13.00 
> load average
> and have about 28,000 files waiting in the mqueue.in directory to be
> processed only a few hours after putting into production.
> 
> I've tried turning off all virus notifications and tweaked the
> mailscanner.conf to process messages both in batch and in 
> queue. While in
> batch mode, I also tried changing the number of messages in 
> the batch to
> process at any one time but it doesn't seem like mailscanner 
> can keep up
> with the number of incoming messages passing thru the system. 
> I've also
> lowered sendmail's logging level to 0, turned off fsync on 
> /var/log/maillog.
> I tried splitting the mqueue.in directory into multiple 
> directories but
> couldn't get sendmail to drop the files into directories 
> under mqueue.in.
> Yes I did change the sendmail startup command to change the 
> incoming queue
> directory to mqueue.in/* and also in mailscanner.conf. So at 
> last, I am
> wondering what else I can try to improve the throughput of the system?
> 
> The specs on the system are as follows:
> 
> Intel PIII 700Mhz
> 512K RAM
> Ultra2-160 SCSI LVD drives
> RedHat 9 + Sendmail 8.12.8 + MailScanner 4.25-14
> 
> I know this system is not very high powered, but I have 
> systems identical to
> this one in a SMTP load-balanced cluster runnig RAV + 
> libmilter wirh no such
> issues.
> 
> Thanks for any advice you might lend.

Please let you know the output of :

free

(to see if you are swapping)

vmstat 5

iostat 5


Also, check your logs for timeouts.

Do you have a caching DNS server on this machine?  If not you should.

hth

Ugo
> 
> Eric Merkel / MetaLINK Technologies, Inc
> ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
> Email: merkel at metalink.net
> Phone: 419-782-3472
> ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
>