I configured my mail relay with 50 MD processes and 50 sendmail child processes. After looking around, it became horrifically apparent that there were not enough sendmail processes available to answer mail requests. I increased the number of processes for MD and sendmail, which ultimately led to the system page faulting itself to death and me feeling really dumb! :)
I was under the misguided impression that there should be a 1:1 ratio of sendmail processes to MD processes. So, I cranked up the number of sendmail processes to 100 and cranked down the number of MD processes to 10 (arbitrary numbers for testing). I ended up solving the sendmail problem, but I think I created a new one. When I look at md-mx-ctrl, I still see most if not all the MD processes sitting idle. There's also a sorely uneven distribution of the workload across the slaves (status and histo shown side-by-side below). Slave 0: idle 9,712 Slave 1: stopped 12,431 Slave 2: stopped 8,329 Slave 3: stopped 5,127 Slave 4: stopped 3,097 Slave 5: idle 1,993 Slave 6: idle 1,300 Slave 7: stopped 982 Slave 8: stopped 810 Slave 9: stopped 722 Slave 10: stopped 579 Slave 11: stopped 486 Slave 12: stopped 419 Slave 13: busy 389 Slave 14: idle 334 Slave 15: stopped 337 Slave 16: stopped 323 Slave 17: stopped 314 Slave 18: idle 271 Slave 19: busy 172 Slave 20: busy 112 Slave 21: idle 67 Slave 22: stopped 43 Slave 23: stopped 20 Slave 24: idle 8 Presumably, these numbers were skewed even more when I had the 1:1 ratio, but I have no evidence to support that supposition. I want to get the most "bang for the buck" out the system, but the numbers and statuses above have me confused. So... Is this normal? Do I trim back the number of MD processes? If I trim the number of MD processes, does the workload distribution become more linear? Last but not least... Is there a recommended ratio of sendmail processes to MD processes? I realize "my mileage may vary," but I wonder if I'm even in the ballpark. Thanks! -- Dave _______________________________________________ NOTE: If there is a disclaimer or other legal boilerplate in the above message, it is NULL AND VOID. You may ignore it. Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com MIMEDefang mailing list [email protected] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
