Performance problems...

[Rose, Bobby]

Are you using any of the SA Custom rules talked about on the SA lists?
My performance problems diminished after I got rid of the
blacklist-uri.cf which is a very large ruleset.  I'm still using
bigevil, tripwire, etc.  Just got rid of the URI.

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Eric J Merkel
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 2:49 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: 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.

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