[Mimedefang] Performance tuning -- simple question

[worldoff9908 at address.com]

This one is a followup to a thread I raised several weeks ago.

I'm still struggling with sendmail timeout errors (reject=451 4.7.1) following
my update of RAV anti-virus to version 8.4.  MIMEDefang is the one taking the
brunt of the problems, where I'm running out of available slaves.

I have checked with RAV tech support on this one, and they haven't been
especially helpful.

Ultimately, I think that the problem is that RAV 8.4 is making more demand of
system resources (and slower at releasing them) than previous versions of RAV.

On my system, I'm running RH 7.2, sendmail 8.12.9, RAV 8.4.4, and SpamAssasin
2.55.  I'm running RAV directly from sendmail, and I also am querying about 8
dnsbl servers.  At the moment, I'm not making queries to Razor or DCC.


At this stage, I'm inclined to believe that the direction I need to go is in
performance tuning.  The box I'm running is a PII/650Mhz, with (now) 512 MB of
RAM.  In the process of checking things, I found that it has been running only
128 MB, and upgrading RAM seems to have helped some.

The box itself isn't super-busy -- an average load is 2-4 messages/minute, but
when it's trying to handle 10 or 15 messages simultaneously, then that's where I
get the slaves and timeouts errors.

>From reading the archives of this list, it would appear that the route to go
would adjusting environment settings.  I'm inclined to start with setting:

   MAX_SLAVES=16
   MIN_SLAVES=2
   BUSY_TIMEOUT=120
   IDLE_TIMEOUT=300

and then doing further tuning from there.  Two questions in this area:

1) For these settings these are initial guesses as to what to set.  Does anybody
have any suggestions as to how to evaluate what further changes I should make --
what to look for, and how potentially to respond?

2) Although I have an idea of what changes to make, I'm embarrassed to say that
I'm somehow missing *where* to make the changes, and I can't find any indication
from either the list archives or the MD docs on this point.  It looks like these
need to go in either /etc/sysconfig/sendmail or /etc/sysconfig/mimedefang, prior
to restarting the appropriate daemons.  What am I missing here?

Also, it looks like from discussion, that it would be good to do some degree of
performance tuning in sendmail, setting confCONNECTION_RATE_THROTTLE, as well as
the sendmail Load Average settings.  For starters, I'm going to set things
according to suggestions posted by Kris Deugau back in April -- that post shows
a hardware configuration that's similar to my own (although a little slower CPU).

In discussions about the throttle, I've seen discussions for setting this one to
both 1 and 2.  For now, I'll go with 2, but if I were to set this one to 1, what
would the performance effect be?

Thanks in advance

Smith

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