On Tue, 24 Jan 2012, Karsten Bräckelmann wrote:

On Mon, 2012-01-23 at 08:03 -0800, John Hardin wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2012, Munroe Sollog wrote:

I am trying to locate reason for performance spikes.  I have read the
various wiki pages, and they suggest solutions but not a way to identify
the bottleneck.  Is there way to increase logging so that I can begin to
identify or rule out the actual performance bottlenecks?

Using debugging as mentioned by John will definitely be helpful to
pinpoint a specific sub-system or rule causing higher load. However,
this pretty much requires sample messages causing the load -- basically
implied by running the stand-alone 'spamassassin' script.

Enabling debug mode on a production system should be done with care and
while closely monitoring the system -- it will result in GOBS of debug
info being logged. Mentioning this, since I understand the OP to not yet
have samples, but generally noticing "performance spikes".

Thus, step one should be to find some samples causing an increased load,
and then to investigate further.

Yes, very good point. Thanks for clarifying that, and apologies on my part for assuming you had problematic messages already identified.

SA should log per-message scan times to the system log. From that you should be able to determine a message recipient and message-ID for messages that take a long time to scan.

You may also be experiencing inbound traffic volume spikes that may be overloading your system.

So, if you can track when the processing spikes occur, two things to correlate are the number of messages you're processing at that time (you may have too many spamd children defined, or not enough memory - are you hitting swap?), and any specific messages received at that time that take an unusually long time to scan (they may be exercising weaknesses in the rules).

One other thing: what version of SA are you using? Older versions have had rules that were known to perform poorly in certain situations and that have been fixed in newer versions.

--
 John Hardin KA7OHZ                    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
 jhar...@impsec.org    FALaholic #11174     pgpk -a jhar...@impsec.org
 key: 0xB8732E79 -- 2D8C 34F4 6411 F507 136C  AF76 D822 E6E6 B873 2E79
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to
  rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out.      -- Forbes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Today: John Moses Browning's 157th Birthday

Reply via email to