Slow mail processing

[Dan Spray]

I had wandered about that.  I read in the archives...

"I am about to try switching ext3 to data journaling. Note that you can
also increase the performance quite a bit by putting the
MailScanner/incoming directory on a tmpfs filesystem. MailScanner does a
lot of file i/o to the MailScanner/incoming dir, and this hammers real
disks quite hard. I have personally seen 30% speed improvement by doing
this. It only takes a minute to change and is definitely worth a try. All
the data in the MailScanner/incoming directory is temporary anyway, so you
don't need to worry about losing anything on power-outs."

This seems like a viable option...problem is, how?  Is there a how-to out
there or something to follow?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of Spicer, Kevin
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 9:58 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Slow mail processing

Dan Spray wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have MS setup on a dual xeon 2.6 with 2 gig of ram and nothing else
> on this server this is running RedHat 9.  Mail comes in and out in a
> test environment very quickly.  However, when I turn other domains
> over to it and it actually starts processing a lot of mail (100+ msg
> /min) the incoming queue starts backing up and before long there are
> thousands of messages in the queue.  I really am only interest in
> running the virus checks (clamav) and local Spamassassin checks
> (bayes, evil_numbers, etc.) so that may be a problem too...I don't see
> how to limit the Spamassassin checks to local check only in the MS
> conf so that may be my problem.  I have pasted a snippet from the
> log.  Any help in getting this sped up would be greatly appreciated.

You can turn off the network tests by using the usual spamassasin
configuration directives in /etc/MailScanner/spamassassin.prefs.conf.

Have you established whether your system is I/O or CPU bound?  There have
been plenty of performance tweaks suggested on list before, probably the
best bang-per-buck is to put the work directory in tmpfs - you also probably
want to drop the batch size to, say, 20 or so, play with the number of
children until you find a number that works well for you.



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