MailScanner load

[DAve]

Scott Silva wrote:
> Steve Campbell spake the following on 8/16/2006 1:20 PM:
>> Decided to make an intelligent statement this time:
>>
>> One thing I did find to lower my load average, though, was MimeDefang in
>> a look-ahead environment.
>>
>> Before installing MimeDefang,  I was receiving about 25K messages a day
>> per server. Most of those were secondary MX relays, that is, mail sent
>> to the secondary MX by spammers, and then relayed to the primary MX or
>> mail store. I just use the look-ahead function in MD, nothing else. The
>> load average was slowly climbing into the 8+ range and higher as a norm.
>> After the install, my message count dropped to around 10K a day, and the
>> load average dropped to around 2-3 as a norm. It still shoots up once in
>> a while, but nothing like before MD.
>>
>> Obviously, running MD will add overhead, but the drop of about 60%
>> emails needing to be scanned more than made up for that. I then was
>> better able to detect more hosts/IP to add to my MTA access file, which
>> made things even better.
>>
>> Another thing to mention is that before and after, mail ran smoothly. It
>> just took a little bit longer before installing MD as there were always
>> more processes (sendmail) trying to deliver DSN mail and the likes.
>>
>> This is not an answer for all systems - it's just that I use my MXs in a
>> bazaar way (I think). My primary MX for one domain is a secondary MX for
>> another domain. The primaries hold the mailboxes for their domain.
>>
>> No smiley face statements here.
>>
> That is how I have been doing it. My PHB's will only spring for a single T-1
> line to each site, so to get some decent fallback I had to do it that way.
> Doesn't make much sense to put your secondary on the same end of a failure.
> I was looking at milter-ahead until it stopped being free.
> I have been looking for a clear howto for MD to do just what you have. Do you
> have a good example or link to one?
> I don't want MD to do anything except the look-ahead.

It's only $115 USD, far cheaper than the cost of the hardware it would 
take to reduce the load the same amount.

We currently use the old-free version. But as soon as we need the 
accessdb configurations we will purchase the new version.

DAve

-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.