[Mimedefang] performance scaling problems

Lucas Albers admin at cs.montana.edu
Fri Jan 30 17:31:04 EST 2004


Some of our main domain primary mx server have been hammerred by this new
virus.
Their primaries rejected around 50,000 virus's each day since the outbreak.

Their queue's are around 3000 messages in each run, 90% of them are:
"user unknown"
Their admin mentioned they get upwards of 50-80 simultaneous server
processes running at once.
I wanted to show them how to use qtool to help manage their queue.

What is the qtool.pl syntax to move 'User unknown' or any defined
rejection code to another queue or just bounce?
I've asked this question on the sendmail group, but they just said to read
the man pages.
I've been using this syntax to move items based on age, but cannot figure
out the syntax
I have been using qtool.pl to age items on the queue on secondary server's
and it has been working great at reducing the size of each queue run.

Items I have seen for speedingup performance are:
multiple queues, multiple queue runners, and configuring aggressive
timesouts for sendmail.mc.
Run fastest virus scanners first. Run daemonized versions of virus scanners.
User ext3 or reiserfs as the filesystem.
Turn off acess time updates to the mail spool. Set noatime.

Any items I am overlooking for Mimedefang/Sendmail scaling?

I was looking at the queue functionality in mimedefang, and I am not sure
how that improves mimedefang performance.
How is the mimedefang queue applied to the message processing?



-- 
Luke Computer Science System Administrator
Security Administrator,College of Engineering
Montana State University-Bozeman,Montana



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