[Mimedefang] Long filter process times.

[David F. Skoll]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Douglas Willis wrote:

> I,m trying to track down a performance problem with my filter.  On one
> machine it takes less than a second to process a particular mail message
> while on another the same message takes 2 minutes.

Is the CPU busy for 2 minutes?  This sounds like a network-related
misconfiguration, like a DNS lookup that is timing out.  Are you using
any DNS-based blacklists from MIMEDefang?

> Is there a flag or setting in mimedefang that shows what part of the
> filter the mimedefang.pl process is currently working on?

Not really... If you can capture the message by keeping the spool
directory around, you can run mimedefang.pl by hand.

Example:

# Undocumented hack to prevent deletion of mdefang-* directories
touch /var/spool/MIMEDefang/DO-NOT-DELETE-WORK-DIRS

# Wait for problem message

rm /var/spool/MIMEDefang/DO-NOT-DELETE-WORK-DIRS

Once you have the problem message in an mdefang-xxxx directory, you
can run mimedefang.pl by hand like this:

	cd mdefang-xxxx
	rm -rf Work
	mimedefang.pl .

You can use whatever Perl debugging facilities or system-call trace
facilities you like to figure out what the last line is doing.

--
David.