MailScanner load

[Martin Hepworth]

Jeremy Blonde wrote:
> I've been wanting to use Bayes for our mailscanner system, but I'm
> wondering now if the overhead is worth it.  We have a new mailscanner
> box running with Postfix (under Gentoo Linux) and it works pretty well,
> we're filtering between 75-80% of our mail as spam.  The box however, is
> hammered, it's running around 5-6 with spikes to 8-9.  I've just turned
> off bayes and I'll see how the load is once it's processed all the back
> logged messages.  We're averaging about 15,000-20,000 messages a day
> (probably more once the school year starts).  Mailscanner is running on
> an HP DL320, hyper-threaded proc, 1 GB of RAM, and raid 1 drives.
> 
> Is that normal for using bayes with mailscanner or do I need to tweak
> some things?
> 
> (I'm already using tmpfs for a little bit of a speed up).
> 
> Jeremy Blonde
> Instructional Technology - Server Support
> Grant Joint Union School District
Jeremy

do you process ALL email or drop stuff on the inbound MTA?

If you can do a check on valid email addresses and drop invalid ones 
you'll drop your processing by over 50% in my experience.

Also what SA rules are you running above the default ones - ie whats in 
/etc/mail/spamassassin.

Do you run a local caching nameserver on the MS box?

have you looked at the tuning stuff on the wiki - that box should be 
able to cope with 50-60k emails a day easy.

BTW load average doesn't mean much - just X processes waiting for resources.

As long as email is traversing MailScanner quickly (sub 30 seconds) load 
Ave doesn't mean much.

-- 
Martin Hepworth
Senior Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

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