[Mimedefang] 40K+ emails a day and choking

Joseph Brennan brennan at columbia.edu
Wed Jan 11 09:26:34 EST 2006



--On Tuesday, January 10, 2006 13:26 -0800 Stephen Ford 
<stephenmford at yahoo.com> 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.


Our incoming pool includes a v210 with 2 gigs ram, and it does 150,000
messages a day without problems-- as comparison.  MX_MINIMUM=5,
MX_MAXIMUM=50.  It doesn't hit 50 unless something is seriously wrong
with our mail system, and in that case a maximum is a good thing.

Definitely run named and nscd on mail servers.  Sendmail does a lot
of dns lookup and it makes a big difference.

/tmp and /var/spool/MIMEDefang should be swap (tmpfs), right.

That's almost twice the per cent of junk we get, and I'm counting
8 and up.  90% scores 20 and up in Spamassassin?  That's incredible.
I thought we had it bad, and now you've cheered me up :-)  ...sorry!

Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology








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