While the queue is building up, run a top and see what's holding things
up. dstat is another handy program for this sort of work.
Since it's a dual processor, I'd suggest building a 2.6 series kernel
for it, since that handles smp much nicer.
On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 05:14:02PM +1100, Dimitry Peisakhov wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> I wrote to the list a few weeks ago asking for advice on spamd
> performance. I got some, and have implemented it, but dont know if i'm
> seeing a performance improvement. The performance i'm getting is far from
> other people are reporting, it seems.
>
> I'm running spamassassin 3.0.1 with postfix 2.0.11-4 on Redhat Enterprise
> linux, kernel 2.4.21-4.ELsmp.
> The box that this runs on is a dual-Xeon 1.5Ghz with 1.5gig memory.
>
> I've done lots of performance enhancing tricks, but havent had very
> noticable success.
> I've changed the language from redhat default utf-8 to regular US-en.
> I'm using spamc/spamd.
> I'm using a caching-only dns server on localhost.
>
> I've also played around with the max-children and max-conn-per-child
> settings for spamd. Since i have lots of memory available i've set
> max-children to 30 amd max-conn-per-child to 250.
> Doing this hasnt increased performance though, i think. The box is able to
> process about 1msg/sec and no better, although i've been told that a box of
> this config should be able to do about 8msgs/sec.
>
> I know that spamassassin3 pre-spawns all its children. I've noticed however
> that when a mail queue builds up i notice only a max of 15 or so working at
> any one time (looking via 'top'), and sometimes none are working at all.
>
> I've got another scanner type app running on the machine as well, Anomy
> Sanitizer, which is launched from the same script as spamc, an attachment
> deleter which doesnt actually run daemonised, but disabling it completely
> doesnt give much of a performance boost.
>
> Currently the system is in testing, so all the mail coming in is actually
> 100% spam. This shouldnt effect spamd performance though?
>
> Can anyone give me some advice about this? At peak spam times I currently
> get mail queue build-ups of 2000+ messages, which results in about 15-20min
> delay of message delivery, which is somewhat unacceptable.
>
> thanks in advance,
> Regards,
>
>
> Dimitry Peisakhov
> Systems Administrator
>
> HENRY WALKER ELTIN
> 02 8875 4721
--
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