My system is being overwhelmed!

[James Gray]

Don Newcomer wrote:
> I'm running MailScanner 4.28.5-2 and SpamAssassin 2.63 using Perl 5.8.3 on
> an HP AlphaServer ES47 with two EV7 1000 MHz processors.  I've been running
> MailScanner for quite some time for virus scanning and just turned on
> SpamAssassin.  I'm doing all I can to limit the load on the box including
> limiting it to 5 processes and declaring anything from a blacklist as spam
> without running SA on it.  What baffles me is the amount of memory I'm
> using:
>
> root      80737 13.3  0.4 84.7M  18M ??       R    16:01:21     0:47.53 [MailSca
> nner]
> root     334448  8.4  0.3 84.3M  14M ??       S    16:01:31     0:48.84 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
> root     323334  7.5  0.2 84.0M 7.1M ??       R    16:05:20     0:23.82 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
> root     315939  4.0  1.4 85.5M  57M ??       R    16:10:49     0:02.07 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
> root     273108  1.8  0.6 84.2M  24M ??       S    16:03:17     0:35.58 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
> root     210765  1.5  0.6 83.7M  23M ??       S    16:03:27     0:32.42 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
> root     116944  0.0  0.0 26.6M 1.5M ??       I    12:40:28     0:00.64 MailScan
> ner /usr/local/MailScanner/etc/MailScanner.conf
>
> Should this really be consuming this many resources?  Our run queues are
> now up in the high teens consistently.  I've done the Message.pm patch so
> the 4.28.6 upgrade isn't the answer.  Thanks in advance.

Yikes - is that 84M paged or resident?!  That seems like an awful lot of
RAM for even MailScanner.  We run over 1300 custom spamassassin rules
with the Bayseian engine, and see less than half of what you're showing
above.

Here's what my main gateway is reporting:
   VSZ   RSS   LIM TSIZ %CPU %MEM COMMAND
41992 41524     -  760 29.0  3.2 /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner
40944 40464     -  760  0.0  3.1 /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner
40868 40372     -  760  0.0  3.1 /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner
40476 39996     -  760  0.0  3.1 /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner
13896 13548     -  760  0.0  1.0 /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner

As you can see, mine are all around the 40-41M mark (except for the
parent process) and that's pretty normal for us.  MailScanner uses lots
of RAM and the more you have, the better.  We only run three children
which suits our mail flow patterns.

SpamAssassin on the other hand is a CPU hog, especially if you are using
the Bayseian engine.  Although with a pair of EV7's @1GHz I wouldn't
think this would pose a significant problem.  Our server on has a single
P3-1.2GHz and rarely goes over 0.5 system load.

Not sure if any of this helps, but I haven't played with HP-UX/True64 in
a long time...so I might be reading the columns all wrong in your original.

Cheers,

James