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
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