System load is very high because of MailScanner

[Rakesh]

    [ The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set.  ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

BG Mahesh wrote:

>>># As a rough guide, try 5 children per CPU. But read the notes above.
>>>Max Children = 5
>>>
>>>I guess I have to change it to 10 and see how things work as we 
>>>have a dual processor
>>>      
>>>
>>You can try it out, it might help or not though, depending on many
>>factors.  As other said, the message delay is the only factor that's
>>always a good indication.
>>
>>Is this a dedicated MailScanner machine?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Yes..the system is used as our mailserver. No other development work etc goes on this machine. It process mail and just mail
>
>  
>
I have recently faced a similar problem especially during the sober and 
mytob outbreak, Servers were slow in processing the mails, I receive 
about 2 lac of mails  per day on individual servers and the mail hit 
rate on the servers were high than the processing rate and usually at a 
given point of time there used to be 1 K of mails waiting in the queue 
to be processed by MailScanner. Here is what I did to optimise my setup 
and thought this might help you.

Reduced the number of Max Children to 5 from 10 (Although I have dual 
Xeon and 2 gigs of RAM)
Kept a decent batch size not too high and not too low : 20

from vmstat and iostat outputs I found tht IO was a prob for me
so I mounted /tmp (area where SA and clamav decomposes mail ) on tmpfs. 
Many would say tht its a bad idea to put /tmp on tmpfs as chances are 
there tht it might grow up and hog up all the memory so I put a size cap 
on it using -size option in mount and did some tests on dummy machines 
to ensure tht its not spilling over the specified limit and since this 
server is just an Anti-Spam/Anti-Virus gateway it was easy for me to 
ensure tht no other apps create their dummy files in /tmp.

This has reduced the disk IO on the system and increased the processing 
to some extent. Now its usually 50 mails at a given time waiting in the 
queue to be processed by MS, while the mail hit rate remains the same.



-- 
Regards, 
Rakesh B. Pal
Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

========================================================
Success is how high you reach after you hit the bottom.
========================================================



----------------------------------------------------------
Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Website:  http://www.netcore.co.in
Spamtraps: http://cleanmail.netcore.co.in/directory.html
----------------------------------------------------------

------------------------ 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 Wiki (http://wiki.mailscanner.info/) and
the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).

Support MailScanner development - buy the book off the website!