is this a serious condition?

[Fred Broughton]

Have you tried the MS time logging function to obtain additional
debugging info?
Check man MailScanner.conf in the System Logging section.

"System logging
       Syslog Facility
              Default: mail

              This  is  the  name  of  the  "facility"  used by syslogd
to log
              MailScanner's messages. If this doesn't mean  anything  to
you,
              then  either leave it alone or else read the "syslogd" man
page.

       Log Speed
              Default: no

              Do you want to log the processing speed for each section
of  the
              code  for  a batch? This can be very useful for diagnosing
speed
              problems, particularly in spam checking.
"
This may help determine where you are slowing down.


-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Swaney [mailto:steve.swaney at FSL.COM] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 9:39 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: is this a serious condition?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf Of Ugo Bellavance
> Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 9:33 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: is this a serious condition?
>
> Piet Bos wrote:
>
> > No I've installed a caching only DNS on my mailgateway.
> > Understood that that measure was sufficient.
>
> It is very good, or even necessary to have a DNS caching server on the
> gateway, however, it can't do miracles.  If the data is not cached and
> your real DNS server is slow or unavailable, you still have a problem.
>
> The timeout could be caused by SA's Plugins as well (dcc, pyzor,
razor),
> or simply CPU or I/O limits.
>
> > bye Piet
> >
> >     How can you rule out DNS? You have *ALL* RBLs that you are using
as
> >     local
> >     zonefiles? Please search the FAQ/MAQ, SA timeouts are hard to
> catch...
> >
> >     Several suggestions are posted on the list in the past.
> >
> >

One that I haven't seen posted but an effective way to track down
SpamAssassin timeouts if you have MailWatch installed:

Select "Tools/Links" from the MailWatch Main Menu
Select "SpamAssassin Lint (Test)" from the page menu

This will run:

        spamassassin -D -p <path to spam.assassin.prefs.conf> -- lint

And displays the results for each step and the TIME it took to complete
the
step. In this MailWatch report, these times are color coded green,
yellow or
red depending on how long the step took to complete.

You may need to run this test many times before a pattern emerges that
will
point to the slow portion of the SpamAssassin tests.

It should be possible to create a command line script that produces the
same
data - might be helpful if anyone wants to tackle that task and post the
results.

Steve

Stephen Swaney
President
Fortress Systems Ltd.
Steve.Swaney at FSL.com




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Fortress Systems Ltd.
www.fsl.com

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