MailScanner and RHEL 3

[Trever Furnish]

Ditto.

I have the same problem on a compaq dl380 g3 with 1GB of RAM and on my
workstation at home.  I went straight from redhat 7.2 to redhat 9, then to
RHEL3 - the same hardware running rh7.2 never had an issue, so I've always
thought it was because of the switch in memory management code RH did
starting with 7.3.

On my mailscanner system, performance increased greatly after I just turned
off swap entirely.  Before that performance would be ok till memory
approached the max of physical ram.  Buffer cache always chewed up way more
than I wanted it to, and so far as I know the amount of buffer cache used
isn't tunable within RHEL3.

I don't know that buffer cache accounts for the whole problem though - I had
more swap used than I had buffer cache in use, so I think there's an issue
with deciding *when* to swap and *when* to unswap. :-(

Although I've been *very* happy with rhel3 since I turned off the swap, I
was awfully disappointed to find this bug still seemingly present.

--
Trever

> -----Original Message-----
> From: List Account [mailto:lists99 at HOTMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 9:47 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: MailScanner and RHEL 3
>
>
> >From: Marco Obaid <marco at MUW.EDU>
> >Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> >To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> >Subject: Re: MailScanner and RHEL 3
> >Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 09:33:55 -0500
> >
> >Hi,
> >
> > > You'll find that over time, your memory will be
> > > eaten up by buffer cache, and your MailScanner/MTA/SpamAssassin/AV
> >processes
> > > will get pushed into swap.  This makes the performance
> horrible, because
> > > your processors get eaten up by I/O wait.  The only fix
> at this time is
> >to
> > > disable swap for your server, then it runs great.
> >
> >Really? I wonder if your system has enough RAM.
> >Anyone else running into this?
> >I am not experiencing the above issue. I have 5 RHEL systems
> processing
> >50k+
> >messages a day with no glitch. Certinly not your issue above !!!
> >
> >Marco
> >
> I have one gig in the machine, but I've seen reports of
> people having the
> same problem on machines with 8 GB of RAM running other
> applications.  It
> seems to be a common problem with RHEL 3, RH9, and probably
> other versions.
> It also happens on other platforms, such as AMD64.  I'm
> starting to think
> though that it's more related to MySQL, because I run
> MailWatch on this
> server too, which requires MySQL.
>
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