> -----Original Message----- > From: Andrew McNaughton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, 23 June 2003 5:03 PM > To: James Gray > Subject: Re: [SLUG] Opinions sought: Exim vs Sendmail > > > > It sounds to me like you might want to allow more concurrent processes > than you are at present. Also, the main resource you need more of is > going to be memory. Have your bean counters taken in that an > extra 512MB > is really petty cash level expenditure? In any case, is > there really any > problem with allowing more concurrent accesses? > > I agree with the suggestion about running your mail filter as > a daemon if > possible. If this serializes your filtering then it should > help a great > deal. > > Andrew
Spamassassin is already running as a daemon and chews up about 24Mb RAM just for the parent process - that's almost 10% of our physical RAM!. spamd children (according to vmstat + ps + top) are all reporting similar usage (23-27Mb RAM). As you suggest the lack of RAM is killing us. I did some burst load testing on it yesterday and found that without limiting child processes for spamd it only took 15 messages in under 5 seconds to sent system load to 15! 14 children of spamd caused so much paging that the system ground to a halt (load peaked at 19!!). So I did some quick calculations and decided 3 spamd children per CPU (with 256Mb RAM) would be appropriate (given average time per message, RAM, other process requirements etc). I managed to send 50 messages in 7 seconds and system load hit 15 for less than 3 seconds and then quickly returned to <1. Paging was non-existent and no connections were refused. So startup scripts are now "spamd -m 3....." So I've put in a capex request for an additional 512MB stick of RAM and see where that gets us. If I get the RAM, I'll increase the number of spamd children to 6 or 7. I've also put in a request for a 2nd CPU but on a different capex :P If I'm *REALLY* lucky, I might get both.....or maybe not too. Thanks to all for the pointers. Looks like I might be able to tune perl and spamassassin a little more to get a bit more out of it :-) --James -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
