Performance problems...

Fri Jan 30 21:06:54 GMT 2004

See response in line....

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ugo Bellavance" <ugob at CAMO-ROUTE.COM>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 3:05 PM
Subject: Re: Performance problems...

> > -----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)

It doesn't appear to be swapping...

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514684     352560     162124          0      91748      80912
-/+ buffers/cache:     179900     334784
Swap:      1020116        124    1019992

>
> vmstat 5
>
> iostat 5
>

I do not seem to have iostat on this machine but here is a sample of the
vmstat.

   procs                      memory      swap          io     system
cpu
 r  b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy
id
10  0  0    124  96680  92392  79592    0    0     0  1045  460   574 54 46
0
10  2  2    124  73732  92396  86048    0    0  1225  1006  612   851 58 42
0
 8  2  1    124  65824  92396  93740    0    0  1454  1766  807  1114 39 30
31
15  0  0    124  69712  92396  94212    0    0    34  1318  518   721 62 38
0
 7  0  0    124  81264  92404  94660    0    0     0  1736  602   852 67 33
0
11  4  1    124  84936  92408  95012    0    0     0  1547  493   763 47 23
30
13  1  2    124  92588  92412  94440    0    0     0  1803  510   761 63 37
0
 9  0  1    124  84756  92416  94764    0    0     0  1641  584   849 58 42
0
 8  2  1    124  87576  92420  94612    0    0     0  1310  576   773 65 35
0
 8  1  1    124  83644  92424  94956    0    0     0  1365  475   672 68 32
0
10  0  0    124  81748  92428  94148    0    0     0  1412  463   662 64 36
0
13  0  0    124  81020  92432  94656    0    0     0  1192  448   664 60 40
0
 9  1  1    124  79820  92436  94968    0    0     0  1106  477   702 57 43
0
 9  4  1    124  73908  92440  95200    0    0     0   859  363   492 50 34
16
 9  1  1    124  76824  92444  95544    0    0     0   894  363   557 63 37
0
12  0  1    124  89176  92452  95840    0    0     0  1388  545   758 71 29
0
 8  0  0    124  79660  92456  96108    0    0     0  1355  496   708 69 31
0
 6 23  0    124  81944  92464  95516    0    0     0  1722  620   790 61 39
0
 7  0  0    124  72148  92472  95560    0    0     0  2358  817  1199 62 38
0

>
> Also, check your logs for timeouts.
>
> Do you have a caching DNS server on this machine?  If not you should.
>

There are a fair number of timeouts. I do not have a caching name server on
this server, but I am going to load one on and see if that helps. I am
running three RBL's on this system so their are a lot of DNS lookups
happening.

Eric