2500 timeouts a day!

[Ugo Bellavance]

Max Kipness wrote:

>>max I started to see alot of timeouts as my server load
>>increased. I've moved off as many RBL's as possible (just
>>using a couple inside SA), moved the bigevil.cf etc to use
>>surbl.org instead and made sure I have a name server (caching
>>only) running my my MS box.
>>
>>I also reduced the number of children and the max number of
>>messages to process at time.
>>
>>Now the timeouts have reduced dramatically.
>
>
> Now the load on the server is something I've never really thought of.

And what is the number?  Have you checked with vmstat?

> Is
> there anyway to offload any processes to another MS server as I'm
> bringing one up as a failover?

What do you mean exactly?

>
> You are saying that you removed bigevil.cf? How do I use surbl.org?
> Isn't that an RBL? It can replace bigevil?

I think this is in an FAQ entry.  I don't use it myself.

>
> Is there a limit on how many SA rule files you should use?
>
> The primary DNS for the MailScanner server is an internal DNS server on
> the same LAN, this in turn forwards requests to an external DNS server
> that is also on the same LAN (we host public DNS). Would it give me any
> advantage to create a caching nameserver on the MailScanner server?

I think so.  A local request is always faster than any network request.

> The
> queries seem to resolve pretty quick when testing with Dig.
>
> I run RBL's via MailScanner and SA. Even though the MS RBL's timeout
> sometimes, that would never cause SA to timeout, right?

No, but there are some RBLs in SA, if you didn't deactivate them.

>
> One other thing. I have a blacklist with about 1500 entries in it. I'm
> going to move this temporarily tonight and see if this reduces the
> timeouts. My blacklist removes 300 pieces of spam per day, so I'm afraid
> to remove it permanently. I tried to look on the logs to see how many of
> them might be also caught by bayes, but it seems as though once an email
> is blacklisted, no other checks are done.
>
> I will also look at reducing the number of children/messages to process.

Take a look at the amount of messages you have in your incoming queue
and compare it with "max child process X max batch size".

>
> Thanks,
> Max
>
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