Desperately trying to debug poor spam scanning performance

[Alex Neuman van der Hans]

Have you tried disabling the various bits and pieces that make up  
spamassassin?

---

Alex Neuman
Reliant Technologies
+507 6781-9505
Skype: alexneuman

On Sep 12, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Ben Tisdall <ben.tisdall at photobox.com>  
wrote:

> Hello all.
>
> I am edging slowly towards the tearing my hair out phase...
>
> I cannot seem to diagnose why an MS box due for installation soon is
> performing much more poorly than its soon to be predecessor & indeed  
> my
> personal MS box running on desktop hardware.
>
> I'll use my personal box (let's call it desky) for comparison  
> purposes here:
>
> BigOne
> ======
>
> 2 x Xeon dual core 3GHz
> 2G RAM
> 2 x 15K SCSI
> Hardware RAID 1 (Smart Array 5i)
> Exim
> Caching dns
>
> Linux newacorn 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Tue Aug 5 07:41:53 EDT 2008
> i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> This is CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
> This is Perl version 5.008008 (5.8.8)
> This is MailScanner version 4.71.10
>
> Desky
> =====
>
> Athlon 64 3200
> 500MB RAM
> 7.2K SATA HD
> Software RAID 1
> Exim
> Caching dns
>
> Linux jitter 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jun 25 13:49:24 EDT 2008  
> i686
> athlon i386 GNU/Linux
> This is CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
> This is Perl version 5.008008 (5.8.8)
> This is MailScanner version 4.67.6
>
> AND just to add insult to injury for my capabilities as sysadmin,  
> BigOne
> is sitting in a dc with good connectivity & Desky is sitting on the  
> end
> of an adsl line!
>
> For testing puposes I have BigOne acting as the primary MX for my
> personal mail domain & forwarding on to Desky. I can mail myself &  
> tail
> the various logs (speed logging enabled of course) to get a feel for  
> how
> quickly individual messages are processed.
>
> Both boxes are running dcc, pyzor & razor2, the fw allows established
> connections back in, no timeouts. But in any case even with these
> disabled the difference remains.
>
> These are some fairly typical (processed) lines of output from the two
> boxes (message sent from gmail).
>
> BigOne:
>
> 17:42:09 Spam Checks completed at 2523 bytes per second
>
> Desky:
>
> 17:42:17 Spam Checks completed at 5672 bytes per second
>
> Often the difference is much greater in Desky's favour.
>
> BigOne is supposed to go into production next week processing 20k per
> day, as things stand I'm not sure it'll hold up.
>
> Any pointers very gratefully received!
>
> Best regards,
>
> Ben.
>
> -- 
> Ben Tisdall
> Linux Systems Administrator | www.photobox.com
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