Help with queue backup

[Peter Bonivart]

Vicchiullo, Rob wrote:
> # metadb
> # metastat

Thanks for posting that Rob. I have looked into it more now and it seems
that c0t0d0 is the real problem. Your mirroring of four mount points
doesn't stress the second drive (c0t1d0) that much so that leaves
/var/spool/mqueue as the mount point that adds too much load to one
drive. Some things to do, from easy to medium:

1. Mount /var/mail, /var/spool/clientmqueue and /var/spool/mqueue with
noatime to save some disk writes. See an example from my vfstab (the
last column is the interesting one):

/dev/md/dsk/d30 /dev/md/rdsk/d30 /queues ufs 1 yes noatime,logging

2. Mount /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming as tmpfs, see example:

swap - /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming tmpfs - yes -

I don't remember if you already did this but it's important and risk free.

3. The two big r/w intensive directories are /var/spool/mqueue and
/var/spool/mqueue.in (if you use default MS directories), that's why you
load c0t0d0s7 and c0t0d0s4 (d3) so much. They should be spread to two
different disks, preferably to two different controllers as well.

I guess you have two 18 GB internal drives and an external array, maybe
an A1000 or similar? You could change the incoming queue directory
(/var/spool/mqueue.in) to /export/home/mqueue.in or /var/mail/mqueue.in
temporarily to test how it will perform. If that works better for you.
you should think about some repartitioning of those big partitions, or
you could just keep it that way if it doesn't bother you.

4. You could also be bogged down by syslogging to /var (d3). If you want
to you could mount /var too with no atime (see 1). You could also syslog
to another host via a second network adapter.

Keep us posted, this is interesting. :-)

--
/Peter Bonivart

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