Hello,
I'm using SA 2.63 with qmail, Qmail-Scanner 1.22 and clamAV 0.72
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Around the times where we get flooded and receive around 2000+ messages an hour the system goes into a meltdown.
SPAMD is taking up most of the processes. The system stops accepting new mail connections. Once it's processed what's in Qmail's connection then it starts to accept until it's full again.
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same thing happens to this system when we receive a "SPAM Flood".
Is there anything I can check or change to make it process faster when a lot of mail is hitting the server?
Be sure to start spamd with the -m parameter. This will at least try to limit the number of child processes spamd can fork. If you can keep spamd from forking uncontrollably, you can prevent the system from running into the swap partition and grinding to a halt. Ideally you want to use large enough number of processes to keep the server fully loaded, but small enough to prevent driving it into the swapfile where it becomes inefficient.
You've got 512mb of ram, and a spamd process on my setup is about 30mb. Giving yourself some headroom for other processes I'd suggest trying a limit between 10 and 15 for starters.
Also note I've heard several people mention that -m did not work for them, however one other person reported it worked, but only if he daemonized spamd with the -d parameter. Thus, I'd also suggest daemonizing spamd.
