Debugging and resolving high loadavg when running MailScanner

[Richard Curtis]

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I am not using either... running
spamassassin -D --lint -p /etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf  says
there are two problems - but the two problems appear to be that razor and
pyzor are not installed..
 
The load is sitting at around 0.5 at the moment - but when I was looking
about 5 minutes ago it shot to 5.0 when a large batch of email came in.
I am wondering if I need to do something with the number of children.  I
currently have it set to 10 - based on the reccomendation of 5 per cpu.  
The other thing I think might be related to my problems are the fact that
the system is using a fair amount of swap - would that contribute to
the load ?
 
Rich 
Are you using razor or pyzor in that setup and does
 
  spamassassin -D --lint -p
/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf
 
show any problems with either of these?
 
If so,
 
  razor-admin -discover
  pyzor discover
 
might be useful (I've put them in a cron job here).
       
Cheers,
 
Phil
 
----
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK
 

________________________________________________________________________________
From: MailScanner mailing list
[mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Richard
Curtis
Sent: 16 February 2005 11:33
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Debugging and resolving high loadavg when running
MailScanner

Hi All,
  I have been running MailScanner (Version 4.35.11) for some
time, but over the last 2 -3 weeks, my loadavg has gone from
~0.10-0.20 to as high as 4.  This may not seem high to some,
but as I have other services on this box I want to try to
reduce the load.
The box runs httpd, sendmail/MailScanner with clamav, radius
and pop.  There are multiple hosted domains on the server. 
The box is a dual AMD Athlon MP 1200 with 512MB RAM. 
 
All mail is scanned through MailScanner for virus's, but only
a small number of the domains (low traffic ones) have
SpamAssassin enabled in MailScanners configs.
I have to admit that I am a bit confused by some of the
MailScanner config options - for example, the effects of
"Deliver In Background = yes" and "Delivery Method = batch".
 
By setting the delivery method to queue, what kind of impact
on delivery time can I expect ?  Will this have a significant
effect of lowering the load ?
 
One other question, I note from looking through the logs, I
see entries like:
Feb 16 11:25:32 lancelot MailScanner[7544]: New Batch:
Scanning 1 messages, 1720 bytes
Feb 16 11:25:32 lancelot MailScanner[7544]: MCP Checks
completed at 1720 bytes per second
Feb 16 11:25:32 lancelot MailScanner[7544]: Spam Checks
completed at 1720 bytes per second
Now what confuses me here is that I have MCP checks and Spam
checks set to off for this mail domain - so why are the
checks happening ?
 
Any suggestions on performance tuning of MailScanner, or
possible sendmail config tweaks would be greatly appreciated.
 
Regards
 
Richard

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Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date:
14/02/05

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Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 14/02/05


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No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 14/02/05

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------
To unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/)
and the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).

Support MailScanner development - buy the book off the website!