Performance problems...

[David Hooton]

> My current settings for the batch mode is below.
> 
> Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 500
> Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 30
> 
> I also tried these at 30/30, 100/50, & 500/100 with no noticeable
> difference. Should I just stick with the defaults of 30/30?

On the box you have I would say you should set it up as follows:

Max Children: 3
Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 10
Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 10

Your box is going to work better with only a few children doing lots of
small batches.

Do stick your MailScanner work directory into tempfs, this provided much
better performance as you'll see below.  Over the last couple of weeks we've
found that we're running out of IO capacity on a fair few of our boxes,
reducing disk IO helps us squeeze that not so little bit more out of the
box.

Performance Tests - 50 Message Batch
=============================================
Children        Msg/Scan        Mins            WorkDir
4               5               0:08:39 DISK
3               5               0:08:05 DISK
3               10              0:09:38 DISK
2               10              0:13:07 DISK
1               10              0:17:00 DISK
0               10              0:15:00 DISK
3               5               0:01:51 TMPFS
3               10              0:01:02 TMPFS
3               15              0:01:10 TMPFS

Machine Specs:
AMD 1.3Ghz
80Gig 7200 rpm IDE HDD
1 Gig RAM
Running a _lot_ of spamassassin rules, RBL's, DCC, Razor, ClamAV, Mcafee

Of course please use this info as a guide only it may or may not be truly
indicative of how things will work out for you.  If anyone has any other
tuning tips I'd love to try them out I'll happily publish the results.

Regards,

David Hooton


========================================================================
 Pain free spam & virus protection by:          www.mailsecurity.net.au
 Forward undetected SPAM to:                   spam at mailsecurity.net.au
========================================================================