Has anyone seen when the load on a MailScanner server

Richard Mealing richard at fastnet.co.uk
Fri May 30 10:49:53 IST 2014


It sounds like you have some high load on your server. Have you looked at your disk i/o activity?

I was getting the same thing with mine some time ago so I had to make some drastic changes to bring the load down.
You should look at things before the mailscanner process, such as RBL’s on your MTA, fail2ban to block malicious senders (fantastic program btw), moving your tmp directories to RAM disk, or adding more servers to compensate for the load.
Thanks,
Rich

From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Philip Parsons
Sent: 29 May 2014 23:54
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: RE: Has anyone seen when the load on a MailScanner server

So digging further into this I have found that it is at the same time there are a bunch of these messages in the logs..

May 23 15:06:15  MailScanner[4971]: Commercial scanner clamav timed out!
May 23 15:06:15 MailScanner[4971]: clamav: Failed to complete, timed out
May 23 15:06:15 MailScanner[4971]: Virus Scanning: Denial Of Service attack is in message s4NLTn3v008504

I do not know of a section in Mailscanner.conf related to that ?




From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info<mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info> [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Jerry Benton
Sent: May-28-14 6:39 AM
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: Re: Has anyone seen when the load on a MailScanner server

See ... my wife was right. I am wrong all the time.
On the same note, I am seeing similar behavior on a lab server I just built testing out Ubuntu 14.04. I will email results when (if) I have them.

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Richard Mealing <richard at fastnet.co.uk<mailto:richard at fastnet.co.uk>> wrote:
I’m not sure that is correct, but I may be wrong too!

# If more messages are found in the queue than this, then switch to an
# "accelerated" mode of processing messages. This will cause it to stop
# scanning messages in strict date order, but in the order it finds them
# in the queue. If your queue is bigger than this size a lot of the time,
# then some messages could be greatly delayed. So treat this option as
# "in emergency only".
Max Normal Queue Size = 2000

So it just stops in the date order and goes for what is top of the queue. I set mine to 2000 but it never reaches that now I have made all my changes.

You should look into tmpfs, it has brought down the load on my servers considerably. I use it for a few things now –

Incoming Work Dir = /tmpfs
SpamAssassin Cache Database File = /tmpfs/SpamAssassin.cache.db
SpamAssassin Temporary Dir = /tmpfs

Maybe run some gstat commands and check your disks are behaving. If not, then implement tmpfs.

Thanks!
Rich

From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info<mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info> [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info<mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info>] On Behalf Of Jerry Benton
Sent: 28 May 2014 08:47
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: Re: Has anyone seen when the load on a MailScanner server

What is happening is your queue is exceeding the threshold set (800 by default I think) where MailScanner just starts to process the email without scanning it. If your server is getting hit by a surge of email and MailScanner cannot keep up, it stops doing checks.
Of course, I could be wrong. Happens a lot.

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Joolee <mailscanner at joolee.nl<mailto:mailscanner at joolee.nl>> wrote:
You probably hit a timeout somewhere. Can you find out from the logs which component times out?

On 28 May 2014 03:37, Philip Parsons <pparsons at techeez.com<mailto:pparsons at techeez.com>> wrote:
Gets too high like 5 or 6 that MailScanner marks all messages as spam ? If you have seen this is there something we can change that changes the process ?

Thank you
P Parsons
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Mailborder Systems
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Mailborder Systems
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