Desperately trying to debug poor spam scanning performance

[dnsadmin 1bigthink.com]

At 12:52 PM 9/12/2008, you 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.

Hello Ben,

You didn't mention any particulars about OS or virus scanner engines..

We could probably help steer you just with that info.


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