MailScanner load

[Scott Silva]

Jeremy Blonde spake the following on 8/15/2006 11:26 AM:
> 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
If you are using the default of 5 children per cpu with that little ram, you
will probably swap.
And a hyper-threaded proc isn't exactly the same as 2 processors. If you can't
add ram, try backing off with the number of children, probably one at a time,
until you get to the point of stabilization. You should be able to process
that load with 2 - 3 children if the mail comes in evenly.

-- 

MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!