AW: [Mimedefang] Sendmail crash

[David F. Skoll]

On 27 Mar 2002, Robert Dege wrote:

> > Actually, I meant how many messages do you receive per day?

> It ranges between 20,000-35,000 emails a day.  This includes internal &
> external emails.

OK, that's fairly high.  If a lot of the messages are big, then limiting
the size of messages you scan with SpamAssassin will help a lot.  Anything
over about 50kB is highly unlikely to be spam:

if ((-s "./INPUTMSG") <= (50 * 1024)) {
	# Run SpamAssassin on small messages only
}

If most of your messages are small, then you might have to bite the bullet
and use a faster machine and/or get more memory.

Another thing: 12-20 concurrent scanners is pretty high.  If your
machine dies under the load, then why not limit it to 10 concurrent
scanners?  There's no point in running more scanners than you need; on
my mail server, I run a minimum of 2 scanners and max out at 10.  In
practice, I hardly ever go above 2 and I've never gone above 5.  Use
the statistics flag (-t) with mimedefang-multiplexor to get an idea of
your load.

If the load is bursty, capping the number of scanners will smooth
things out so your machine can keep up.  If the load is sustained,
then you have no choice but to get a more powerful machine.

Regards,

David.