[Mimedefang] Max Slaves setting in Mimedefang

[David F. Skoll]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Kris Deugau wrote:

> The rule of thumb I've seen is between 16 and 20M of real memory per
> slave.

Right; that's my rule of thumb.  With 512MB, it's a bit dangerous
to set MAX_SLAVES higher than 32 or so.

The best way to determine MIN_SLAVES is to set MIN_SLAVES low, and set
MAX_SLAVES to the rule-of-thumb maximum, and then wait.  Enable
statistics loging, and check the "nbusy=" entries.  If you find (for
example) that most of the time, fewer than 7 slaves or busy, then set
MIN_SLAVES to 7.

You may need to experiment with MAX_SLAVES; at first glance, it seems
like you should use the rule-of-thumb maximum to avoid unnecessarily
limiting throughput.  Unfortunately, however, spam-scanning is often
CPU bound and adding more slaves won't help (and might hurt)
throughput.

Regards,

David.