Minimum hardware capacity for 35k e-mail scans/day

[Edward Prendergast]

> Any advice from the vast pool of MailScanner experience would be greatly
> appreciated.

>> Are you queues actually building up or are you just concerned with the 
>> load average?

In reply to Greg and Julian:

The queue seems to go up with the load. By the time the load is around 10
the queue starts to climb without any sign of going down. It usually reaches
the 300 mark within half an hour to an hour, but has gone up as far as
3,000. When I turn bayes off the load goes down and mail queues start
becoming manageable again. 

Our users largely use POP3, with a few using IMAP through squirrelmail.
Their mailboxes usually tend to contain around 300 messages.

Here's how vmstat looks now with bayes enabled:
# vmstat 10 5
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id
wa
 0  5 377144 682732  11324  90488    1    0     4     1    0     0 15  5 70
10
 1 12 377056 723572  12468  94280   47    2  2130   725 1475   795 12  4 45
39
 1  4 376984 668068  15100 101712   53   15  2215   778 1486   759  7  3 50
40
 1  5 377016 704180  13952 108476   56    4  2127  1596 1500   997 11  4 39
46

It looks to me like there might be some thrashing going on.

At this level, the queue looks like this:
Nov 15 14:32:36 server6 MailScanner[8106]: New Batch: Found 2697 messages
waiting
Nov 15 14:32:36 server6 MailScanner[8106]: New Batch: Scanning 10 messages,
38032 bytes



************
The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged.
It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else
is unauthorised. If you are not the intended recipient, any action taken or
omitted to be taken in reliance on it, any form of reproduction,
dissemination, copying, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or
publication of this E-mail message is strictly prohibited and may be
unlawful. If you have received this E-mail message in error, please notify
us immediately. Please also destroy and delete the message from your
computer.
************