MailScanner and RHEL 3

[Christopher Schanzle]

Chris Conn wrote:

> 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
>
Chris [Conn, not me :-],

Is it possible your 2GB configuration puts you into a different kernel
class, e.g., bigmem or highmem?   It might be helpful if everybody with
this problem shared the output of these two commands:

rpm -q --qf="%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" kernel-`uname -r`
uname -a

And for those struggling with performance problems, are you *sure* you
are swapping?  Does "vmstat 1" show lots of activity in the "si" and
"so" (swap in, swap out) columns?  Not meaning to insult anyone by
stating the obvious, but activity in the "bi" and "bo" (blocks in,
blocks out) is normal on a busy system.

Regards,
Chris Schanzle

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