MailScanner and RHEL 3

[Chris Conn]

Trever Furnish wrote:

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: mailscanner-user [mailto:mailscanner-user at NELAND.DK]
>>Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 12:43 AM
>>To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>>Subject: Re: MailScanner and RHEL 3
>>
>>
>>Trever Furnish <TGFurnish at HERFFJONES.COM> wrote:
>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>
>>If the RHEL kernel has these memory issues, it should be
>>possible to just
>>use a standard, non-RH kernel instead, as these problems are
>>not reported
>>from other linux'es.
>
>
> True, and thanks for the suggestion, but that sort of negates the primary
> reason for paying redhat, which is to avoid having to maintain the system
> software yourself. :-)

Hello,

We have several RHEL3 systems running MailScanner, SpamAssassin and
Clamav and none of those systems have even _touched_ the swap.  Some of
these systems handle up to 200,000 messages per day, sometimes more
depending on the usual spam load =)  Load averages are consistently
below 0.5 and hover around 0.2, and these systems are configured with
2GB of RAM.

We have stuck to RH kernels, the only thing we may have done differently
is rebuild all of the RPMs for the various utilities (SpamAssassin and
clamav in particular) using rpmbuild instead of installing the pre-built
rpms.  The rest is RedHat stock.

Chris

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