email builder wrote: >>I'd recommend upgrading to a dual server or perhaps putting in a second >>server with round robin DNS (or if you can do it, a load balancer). > > > also, what do people think about a multiple cpu machine vs more than one > machine? dumb question? (two machines always are faster than one dual-cpu > machine)
I tend to prefer dual CPU machines as servers. They have the large advantage that if some badly behaved process wedges the processor, you just get one CPU running flat out, and the machine remains responsive. Now you can ameliorate this sort of thing with ulimits and such like, but nothing beats having a second CPU in the box, IMO. It also gives you redundancy in case of failure, as most dual CPU machines will run fine on 1 CPU for a while. Regarding your problems, I'm sure there must be somethin wrong - SA should not be that CPU intensive. I'm running it on a dual CPU Athlon 2000, using spamd via a sendmail milter. CPU usage for the individula spamd child processes never seems to go much above about 8-9%, and even that is momentary. After a 65 day uptime, some of my spamd processes (quickly pasted from top) look more or less like this:- PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 11257 spamd 9 0 21200 17M 5144 S 0.0 1.6 0:18 spamd 4965 spamd 9 0 31632 27M 5096 S 0.0 2.6 0:12 spamd 29212 spamd 9 0 21792 17M 5060 S 0.0 1.7 0:11 spamd 16522 spamd 9 0 20816 16M 5040 S 0.0 1.6 0:07 spamd The ps listing showing command line used and stuff:- 30559 ? S 0:02 /usr/sbin/spamd -x -u spamd -m 10 -d --pidfile=/var/run/spamassassin/spamd.pid 10873 ? S 0:23 \_ spamd child 11257 ? S 0:18 \_ spamd child 29212 ? S 0:11 \_ spamd child 4965 ? S 0:12 \_ spamd child 16522 ? S 0:07 \_ spamd child 16724 ? S 0:06 \_ spamd child 24921 ? S 0:03 \_ spamd child 25813 ? S 0:03 \_ spamd child 29211 ? S 0:01 \_ spamd child 29899 ? S 0:00 \_ spamd child As you can see, they're hardly a serious drain. Now my system is much less busy - throughput generally sits around 5-10 messages/minute, and the system serves only about 50 users. Even so, what you're seeing looks excessive to my eyes. I'm using Debian Woody, with SpamAssassin 3.0.0 from backports.org. HTH, Mike.
