MS bogging under load ...

[Mike Kercher]

Garry Glendown wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've lately run into some load issues with MS ... I'm running the
> current version, though looking at the mrtg stats, it seems the
> problem may have been around ever since I upgraded to 4.31.6 and
> later ... I'm running on a Celeron 2.2 w/512M of RAM ...
>
> Anyway, usually, MS is handling the incoming mail load pretty
> decently ... the box has a daily load of around 20-25k mails or
> 500-800megs ...
> spam ratio of anywhere between 50-75%, viruses/unwanted file types
> around 10-20% (d at mn Windoze). I'm running ClamAV and F-Prot. Most of
> the time, mail comes in and MS has to handle something like 2-5 mails
> per batch, sometimes more. No sweat. At some point though, mails just
> start backing up in the mqueue.in ... MS just goes to the configured
> maximum of 30 mails per batch, and all 4 threads I've configured
> can't seem to cope with the flow anymore (though checking the
> incoming mails in the log/mail file doesn't appear any worse than
> from the regular flow). I've read through the FAQ/MAQ and already
> moved the MS working directory to the ram disk, which seemed to have
> helped at first, but I'm more or less back to the beginning, with
> queues of up to 1000 and more mails building up ... At the times of
> the backlog, memory is pretty tight (which is why I already limited
> MS to 4 threads, I think the default is 5 IIRC), but no much swap
> used ... load avg runs around 4-5, with the CPU having some idle time
> left ... (making me believe it might be something with the I/O system
> - running on RAID1 ATA drives)
>
> Question: where could I check into what might be causing this? I
> don't think the above config should not be able to handle that kind
> of load ... !?
>
> Tnx, -gg
>
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Are you running any non-default SA rules?  Bigevil turned out to be my
demon.

Mike

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