MailScanner load

[Daniel Maher]

I had three machines running MailScanner, doing around 500,000 mails per day across the group.  Load was constantly around 20, and mail delays were rampant.

Then I subscribed to the TrendMicro RBL, and integrated LDAP for destination verification at the MTA layer.  The amount of mail that actually reaches MailScanner has been reduced by about 92% (not a typo, actual tracked statistic).

The moral of the story is this: Adding more hardware is one thing.  Tweaking MailScanner is another.  But actually taking steps to eliminate spam at the earliest possible point - that's where you'll find real performance improvements.

--
  _
 °v°  Daniel Maher
/(_)\ Administrateur Système Unix
 ^ ^  Unix System Administrator
 
Sentio aliquos togatos contra me conspirare.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
> bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Gordon Colyn
> Sent: August 15, 2006 2:36 PM
> To: MailScanner discussion
> Subject: Re: MailScanner load
> 
> I had the same problem with my box, maxed the load at about 5-6 doing 20k
> messages per day.  Just increased my ram to 4gb and have seen the load
> drop
> to between 0.50 and 1.50 max when looking at stats with mailscanner!  Now
> doing 25k and growing to 30k and the load is sitting at approx .75 to 1.5.
> 
> Gordon
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jeremy Blonde" <JeremyBlonde at grant.k12.ca.us>
> To: "MailScanner discussion" <mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 8:26 PM
> Subject: MailScanner load
> 
> 
> 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
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