[Mimedefang] 40K+ emails a day and choking

[Rick Mallett]

What else is running on the box? Are you running a POP server or the
UW IMAP server by any chance? If so, your performance problems could
be due to excessive "checking for new mail" by poorly configured
and/or designed email clients (eg. Outlook Express).

We've been experiencing high load factors on a similar machine, and
for the longest time thought it was due to MD and SA, but realized it
was POP and IMAP server activity when we happened to notice that the
load factor was down on weekends and at night despite the fact that
there was just as much incoming mail at those times. You won't see
this using top or prstat, BTW, but you should see it by analyzing the
POP/IMAP server logs.

- rick

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Stephen Ford wrote:

> I'm running Solaris 9 on a dual processor 220R with 2
> gigs of ram and the box is having trouble keeping up
> with spam!?!?  I am using all the bells and whistles
> spamassassin and mimedefang can have, minus the virus
> protection (another box handles that).  I have a
> min/max of 20/90 for mimedefang and I'm no longer
> hitting a max number of files open ceiling......  I'd
> say 90% of our email is spam (we are a small college
> with ~3000 email accounts) with scores averaging 20
> and above :-/
>
> I'm going to add a local dns (even though the dns
> doesn't appear to be the bottle neck) and perhaps host
> a dcc server.....  I can also setup another box and
> round robin them but I shouldn't *have to* should I?
>
> Oh, and yes /var/spool/MIMEDefang is swap.
>
> Any sug
>
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