Debug on a production server

Julian Field MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Wed Oct 17 10:17:14 IST 2007


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Scott Silva wrote:
> on 10/12/2007 1:21 AM Julian Field spake the following:
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>>
>>
>> Scott Silva wrote:
>>> on 10/11/2007 1:38 PM Mikael Syska spake the following:
>>>> Scott Silva wrote:
>>>>> on 10/11/2007 12:02 PM Mikael Syska spake the following:
>>>>>> Ugo Bellavance wrote:
>>>>>>> Mikael Syska wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>>>> There does not seem to be much info on this ... and my scan 
>>>>>>>>>> times are also rather high ... not that its a problem atm ... 
>>>>>>>>>> but it could be in the future :-(
>>>>>>>>> Please provide more information:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Hardware
>>>>>>>> OS: FreeBSD 7 ( yes its current, but 6.4 did not perform very 
>>>>>>>> disk with the SAS 5iR controller
>>>>>>>> 2GB ram
>>>>>>>> Dual Core Intel Xeon 3060 2.40 Ghz
>>>>>>>>> # of child processes
>>>>>>>> 8
>>>>>>>>> scan times of full batches.
>>>>>>>> Oct 11 18:48:58 spam02 MailScanner[72858]: Batch (15 messages) 
>>>>>>>> processed in 89.57 seconds
>>>>>>>> Oct 11 18:49:08 spam02 MailScanner[72872]: Batch (15 messages) 
>>>>>>>> processed in 88.72 seconds
>>>>>>>> Oct 11 18:49:10 spam02 MailScanner[72854]: Batch (15 messages) 
>>>>>>>> processed in 106.89 seconds
>>>>>>>> Oct 11 18:49:19 spam02 MailScanner[72865]: Batch (15 messages) 
>>>>>>>> processed in 105.85 seconds
>>>>>>> Looks fine.  Is there a reason why you use 15 message batches?
>>>>>> you mean instead of 30 ....
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Some performance turning I read on the wiki ... but t does not 
>>>>>> seem to have any effect on my system ... so it will do up to 
>>>>>> deafult again.
>>>>>>>>> Using RBLs at MTA
>>>>>>>> nope ... we have had very bad exprerience with that ... both 
>>>>>>>> tried spamcop and spamhaus ... both have to many FP here in 
>>>>>>>> denmark ....
>>>>>>> Spamcop is FP-prone, but I've never heard of a FP in north 
>>>>>>> america for spamhaus.
>>>>>> Then you are a lucky man ...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> since the server aint that overloaded I dont see any reason to 
>>>>>> risk getting any FP ...
>>>>>>>> Its not a problem that I takes so long time .. just saw the 
>>>>>>>> message about the patch and wandered if that would make a diff 
>>>>>>>> on my scan times ...
>>>>>>> Ok, I doubt so. Did you put the MailScanner working dir and /tmp 
>>>>>>> in memory (tmpfs on linux)?
>>>>>> no ... its on the disk ... and since every mail could be far too 
>>>>>> important I dont intend to use it ....
>>>>> Tmpfs is absolutely safe on mailscanner if you follow the wiki and 
>>>>> only put the mailscanner incoming directory there. And the speed 
>>>>> increase is very noticeable, especially in virus and spam scanning.
>>>>> Mailscanner does not actually remove any messages. It sees the 
>>>>> message in mqueue.in, extracts it to incoming, does its work, and 
>>>>> if messages are clean it hard links it to mqueue and then unlinks 
>>>>> from mqueue.in. So there is no chance of mailscanner losing a 
>>>>> message. If it dies at any point up to the unlink, the original 
>>>>> message is in mqueue.in waiting to be processed again.
>>>> You mention the wiki ... I can only see 
>>>> http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php and a link to: 
>>>> http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/serve/cache/120.html 
>>>> witch does not seem to work.
>>>>
>>>> and there does not seem to be anything about tmpfs ... if ... then 
>>>> I'm not able to find it ...
>>>>
>>> Julian,
>>> Do you have any of this old material ( like 
>>> http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/serve/cache/120.html) 
>>> archived somewhere?
>>> I would be willing to spend some time fixing this up if I had the 
>>> content to put in.
>>> I don't want to go from memory, as I will probably get something 
>>> really wonky.
>>>
>> Thank you very much, it's greatly appreciated!
>> The old material is now online again at
>> http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner.archive/serve/cache/
>> If you could get it added to the wiki (the useful bits, anyway :-) 
>> that would be great.
>>
> There is much outdated info in here. I will need to spend more time 
> trying to fix it up where I can, and post links to parts that I need 
> experts in that area (postfix, exim, sql, etc...) to clean up.
> I will also try to leave docs as generic as possibe, and not use full 
> paths, since they are different from rpm and tarball installs.
>
> Julian,
> Are you going to leave the old cache up for a while, or are you going 
> to remove it soon? I thought about fixing links into the old docs at 
> first until I can fix the entire section.
>
I'll leave all the old stuff up there for as long as you need it, don't 
worry.
Many thanks for your help,

Jules

- -- 
Julian Field MEng CITP
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