Load average high!!!

[Ugo Bellavance]

>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : Vinayakam Murugan [mailto:vinayakm at THEARGONCOMPANY.COM]
>Envoyé : 15 mars, 2004 12:15
>À : MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>Objet : Load average high!!!
>
>
>Hi
>
>One of our customers has a PIII server with 128 MB RAM and a 
>20 GB HDD. They
>were using MailScanner 4.21 and clamav 0.60 till today. They 
>used to face the
>problem of load averages shooting up quite frequently. I 
>upgraded them to
>MailScanner 4.28.6-1 and clamav 0.67 today. Some time after 
>the upgrade, I
>noticed that the load average was still shooting up to above 
>5. I stopped
>MailScanner. The load average came down almost immediately. I 
>was able to
>convince the guy to upgrade to 256 MB RAM. Things seem stable now.
>
>Is this hardware configuration low for a server that is a 
>internet router and
>a mail server  for < 1000 messages a day?

A load of 5 is not that bad.  The best performance measure you can use is message delay, I think.

A load of 5 only means that at all times, 5 processes are waiting for some resource.  However, if those 5 processes are MS processes...

I think ram can really be a bottleneck.

Once it starts swapping, it can really kill your server.

How many max child process?  I don't think you'd need more than 1...

>
>--
>Warm Regards
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Vinayakam Murugan
>
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