70k mqueue.in but load under 1 ??

[Martin Hepworth]

Tony Johansson wrote:
> I've reinstalled our MailScanner servers with CentOS4.4 (previous 
> centos3.x) and upgraded memory from 1 to 2Gb.
> Servers are HP Proliant DL380G3 running at 3.0Ghz
> 
> They process about 80k messages/day each with round-robin dns records.
> 
> On occasion the queues build up (this morning it was 70k!) but the load 
> on the machines go way down, usually under 1.
> 
> "sar" shows:
> 10:00:01 AM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait     %idle
> 10:10:02 AM       all     49.72      0.00     10.70      1.60     37.98
> 10:20:01 AM       all     45.30      0.00     10.20      1.54     42.96
> 10:30:02 AM       all     47.36      0.00     10.24      1.58     40.82
> 
> MailScanner version 4.56.8
> 5 children 30 messages
> SpamAssassin 3.1.7 with use_bayes 0
> 
> time spamassassin --lint -D
> real    0m2.596s
> user    0m1.345s
> sys     0m0.097s
> 
> rules_du_jour not active
> clamav and bitdefender
> local caching dns (named)
> 2.6.9-42.EL kernel
> 
> bonnie++ looks fine?:
> ms01 2G 24176 77 52571 24 20910 7 25757 69 57056 8 558.2 1 16 +++++ +++ 
> +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
> 
> Used to run smoothly until the upgrade.
> 
> Any ideas on whats going on here and what I can do to troubleshoot?
> 
> Regards, Tony
> 
Tony

what MTA?

Recent MS versions assume if you are using sendmail, it's 8.13.x and 
thus the lock type is posix, not flock as is for v 8.12.x and previous.

if you are using sendmail 8.12 you'll need to force the lock type to 
'flock' in mailScanner.conf.

Another issue is the way certain spam is using email, it can cause a big 
problem with sendmail 8.12. Only solution is to upgrade to 8.13 and use 
the greet_pause feature.


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

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