messages backing up - help

[Michael Baird]

Something is way off, those batch times are terrible, especially without 
spamassassin running. Have you tried running MailScanner in debug mode, 
and watching it process a batch interactively to see where all the time 
is being spent?

I'd lower Max Children way down, say 5 and work up from there, and see 
if it speeds up your batch time, too many simultaneous scan's of 
mailqueue could be at issue, or too many clamav processes.

Regards
Michael Baird

> I am running FreeBSD 6.2 with MailScanner 4.61.7 and ClamAV 0.91.2 on a Dual
> Xeon 3.0GHz with 2 Gig RAM server.
> 
> This box is just a pre-filter to do AV scan and the basic RBL and phishing
> scan. No spamassasin filtering on this server.
> 
> I have been messing with the Max Children, Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan
> and Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan to find the magic numbers to get mail to
> prcess through this server smoothly.
> 
> Max Children = 30
> Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 40
> Max Unsafe Messages Per Scan = 40
> Max Normal Queue Size = 5
> 
> Current queue has 5000 messages waiting to be scanned. 
> ----------------------------
> smtp1(1600):[/usr/local/etc/MailScanner]-#ps auxww | grep MailS | wc -l
>       17
> smtp1(1601):[/usr/local/etc/MailScanner]-#w
> 12:18PM  up 30 days,  2:38, 2 users, load averages: 1.47, 1.35, 1.37
> 
> Sep 26 12:18:25 smtp1 MailScanner[83495]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 52.51 seconds
> ---------------------------
> smtp1(1613):[/usr/local/etc/MailScanner]-#ps auxww | grep MailS | wc -l
>       32
> smtp1(1614):[/usr/local/etc/MailScanner]-#w
> 12:20PM  up 30 days,  2:40, 2 users, load averages: 0.53, 1.10, 1.27
> 
> Sep 26 12:20:40 smtp1 MailScanner[83502]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 182.66 seconds
> 
> I can't find it.
> 
> I grep the mail logs for the scan seconds and I find this.
> 
> Sep 26 12:00:49 smtp1 MailScanner[78986]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 221.82 seconds
> Sep 26 12:01:07 smtp1 MailScanner[78940]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 239.80 seconds
> Sep 26 12:01:09 smtp1 MailScanner[79037]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 237.63 seconds
> 
> Then: 
> 
> Sep 26 12:08:46 smtp1 MailScanner[79484]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 667.70 seconds
> Sep 26 12:08:53 smtp1 MailScanner[79207]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 691.09 seconds
> Sep 26 12:08:56 smtp1 MailScanner[79329]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 678.39 seconds
> 
> And this time will continue to climb. 
> 
> Earlier it was: 
> Sep 26 11:52:53 smtp1 MailScanner[64885]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 1272.42 seconds
> Sep 26 11:52:54 smtp1 MailScanner[65051]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 1291.63 seconds
> Sep 26 11:53:36 smtp1 MailScanner[66205]: Batch (40 messages) processed in
> 1186.13 seconds
> 
> I restarted MailScanner and it goes back down for a short time.
> 
> I have another server similar specs, FreeBSD 6.1, 4 Gig RAM, Dual Xeon
> 2.8GHz same MailScanner and Clam version. It's time also climbs, but takes a
> long time and the /var/spool/mqueue.in directory doesn't fill up with
> messages waiting to scan. This server can handle about twice as much
> throughput as the other. I also have the MailScanner.conf settings as above
> set higher. This one has 20 children with 80 messages per scan. The time
> rarely gets above 300 seconds in the mail logs.
> 
> How can I troubleshoot this? Obviously it's not going to be fixed by
> tweaking those MailScanner settings above. I just don't have any idea why
> the scan times creep up like that.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks,
> Chuck
>