Troubleshooting slow processing

[Mike Kercher]

MailScanner mailing list <> scribbled on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:23
AM:

> Max Kipness wrote:
>> As of yesterday, processing through MailScanner has slowed
> to a crawl.
>> Nothing to my knowledge has changed on the MailScanner
> server in any way.
>> 
>> Basically it appears like MailScanner is processing fine,
> but then not
>> handing off the messages to Sendmail. There are hundreds of
> messages
>> in the Sendmail inbound queue (mqueue.in) sits at about 700 - 800
>> messages, then the MailScanner will fill to 90 and sit
> there for the
>> longest time, then it will fill to about 120 and dump some
> messages to
>> the sendmail outbound queue (mqueue). Other than that the Sendmail
>> outbound queue just sits at zero for long periods.
>> 
>> I created a realtime app that tracks the message queue, and
> here is a
>> snapshot of what it basically has looked liked for hours:
>> 
>> Mail Queues (In order Processed)
>> -------------------------------
>> Sendmail Inbound Queue          731
>> MailScanner Inbound Queue:      90
>> Sendmail Outbound Queue:        0
>> 
>> CPU Load: 74
>> 
>> 3 Second interval
> We had a problem like this a while back. It ended up to be
> related to some malformed spam the mail server received after
> we stopped spam scanning on the old mail server and moved
> that function to new MX servers. I can't remember excatly
> what was wrong except that all the messages with the issue
> were several days older than all the legit email. I used find
> and execed to rm to remove the old files and useage dropped
> to below 1% and mail started processing normally. Sorry I
> can't remember any more details.

I had a similar problem on one server.  It seems that MailScanner kept
processing the same messages over and over again.  These were High Scoring
Spams which MS should have deleted according to my rules.  What I ended up
doing was change the ruleset to forward the high scoring spam to /dev/null.
The problem has never come up again after that change.

Mike

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