Slow mail processing

[Julian Field]

At 18:06 31/03/2004, you wrote:
>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?

Look in your /etc/fstab file. Stop MailScanner. Copy the line that mounts
/dev/shm to mount /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming instead. Then "mount
/var/spool/MailScanner/incoming". Then restart MailScanner.


>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.
>
>
>
>BMRB International
>http://www.bmrb.co.uk
>+44 (0)20 8566 5000
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--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
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