With a solution like that, the concurrency problems would quickly render the data worthless. As you mentioned, each instance of spamdyke would have to read the statistics file, increment the counters and rewrite the file.
However, imagine if two instances of spamdyke tried to do this simultaneously. If they both read the file at the same time, they would both load the same numbers into memory. They would both increment one of the counters and try to rewrite the file. It would be a classic "race condition", where the last process to write the file would produce the numbers that were saved. The other process' numbers would be lost. On a busy server, you would lose so much data that the file would be meaningless. Incidentally, this is exactly why the syslogd daemon exists. If every daemon on the server tried to write its own entries to the system logs, many entries would be lost. The syslogd daemon accepts the log messages through a system call (not subject to this type of race condition) and writes the file itself. Once spamdyke runs as a daemon, these concerns will disappear. spamdyke could write to a statistics file periodically, log to a database periodically or whatever. I'll put this suggestion on my TODO list. -- Sam Clippinger Otto Berger wrote: > Hi Sam, > > first of all i would like to thank you for providing this great software > - it saved on our spam-gateway much cpu-time regarding spamassassin... > > I have one request regarding spamdyke statistics: > > I'd dont like very much that log-file-scanning method (run by 5 minutes) > to get statistical data. > > What about the idea that spamdyke writes a small statistics file with > simple counters (32bit-overflow?) for example. > > Then it should be very easy an performance-friendly to generate > rrdtool-related graphs (MRTG, cacti). > > Example: > > DENIED_RBL_MATCH 985485 > DENIED_RHSBL_MATCH 56 > DENIED_SENDER_NO_MX 856 > > > i know - spamdyke isnt a deamon, so on every run the stats-file must be > parsed and updated - but i think its a more clean solution as scanning > big logfiles... > > what do you think about it? > > many regards, > > Otto > > -- > www.bergerdata.de > > > > night duke schrieb: >> It's possible to make stats of spam with maillog. >> It's easy to do with mrtg? >> >> Thanks >> >> Nightduke >> >> >> >> >> ______________________________________________ >> ¿Chef por primera vez? >> Sé un mejor Cocinillas. >> http://es.answers.yahoo.com/info/welcome >> _______________________________________________ >> spamdyke-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://www.spamdyke.org/mailman/listinfo/spamdyke-users > > _______________________________________________ > spamdyke-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.spamdyke.org/mailman/listinfo/spamdyke-users _______________________________________________ spamdyke-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.spamdyke.org/mailman/listinfo/spamdyke-users
