MailScanner load

[Michael Baird]

On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 11:46 -0800, Kevin Miller wrote:
> Daniel Maher wrote:
> > 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.   
> 
> I agree with Daniel here.  Not sure if the OP is running Postfix or
> sendmail (too lazy to go back and look) but I saw a tremendous drop in
> the number of inbound messages getting past my MTA just turning on
> greet_pause in sendmail.  Anything that can stop the spam messages
> during the handshaking will lighten the load on your servers
> considerably...

To beat a dead horse from another recent thread, check out
greylist-milter, on my system it had a bigger impact then sendmail's
greet_pause, took the load down a nicely.

Regards
Michael Baird