falz,

> I've got several postfix/amavis filtering types of installs setup. On
> my most recent one, I've hit a snag that I haven't yet been able to
> figure out. This particular server handles about 70k messages per day,
> which is generally fine. Anyhow, things will churn along fine for days
> and then all of a sudden I'll get a backlog in my active postfix queue
> (meaning things are still churning, but it can't process messages as
> quickly as it's getting them in).
> Looking at the TIMING log entries that amavisd-new creates, I get
> things like this:
>   update_cache: 17135 (67%)

Looks like a problem with berkeley db (libdb). What version of libdb are you
using - it is logged during startup like:

  amavis[xxx]: Creating db in /var/amavis/db/; BerkeleyDB 0.27, libdb 4.3

The last time this was reported it turned out it was with an old version
of libdb. If this is also true in your case, try with a more recent version
form ports, e.g. databases/db42 or databases/db43 or databases/db44.
See also that the databases/p5-BerkeleyDB is reasonably recent.

> So, 17 seconds for the "update_cache" step. Can anyone elaborate on
> what exactly that is?

It is not normal. Possibly a contention, but more likely a bug in bdb.
During "update_cache" step a MD5 digest of a message body, along
with results of virus and spam checks, are written to a database.

> /var/amavis is currently on a ramdisk, (freebsd 
> 6.0) so it shouldn't be disk IO related. Also, is this related to the
> $enable_global_cache setting? If so, what exactly does this cache do?

Yes, it is related. Setting $enable_global_cache to 0 will disable
bdb-based cache, which can be used as a stop-gap measure
until the problem is fixed.

Using a cache of recent mail checks can quicken checking messages
that have the same content and are sent as separate messages,
e.g. some types of spam or viruses, and some types of mailing list traffic. 
Turning it off looses some benefit, but is not too bad.

  Mark


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