[Mimedefang] BIG problems with mimedefang

[Wesley Peters]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mimedefang-bounces at lists.roaringpenguin.com
> [mailto:mimedefang-bounces at lists.roaringpenguin.com]On Behalf Of David
> F. Skoll
> Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 12:22 PM
> To: mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com
> Subject: Re: [Mimedefang] BIG problems with mimedefang
> 
> 
> Lisa Casey wrote:
> 
> [classic symptoms of an overloaded system.]
> 
> First question: do you have /var/spool/MIMEDefang on a 
> RAMdisk?  If not, fix it now!

Please note that if you're running FreeBSD, moving to
a 'ram disk' won't help and will likely hurt.  Make sure
your /var/spool filesystem has softupdates enabled.
You may want to try the 'noatime' option as well.

> Next: It looks like you have 512MB of memory.  You don't want 
> to increase
> MX_MAXIMUM much beyond around 20, or the server will start swapping.
> 
> How much mail does the machine process per day?

40K messages isn't all that much, we've done more than double that
on a Celeron 2.0 with 512MB RAM.  You'll want to check the logs to 
see if sendmail is throttling the connection inappropriately; we tuned
for 10 perl slaves and found sendmail constantly bumping into the
load average limit at 12.  We reconfigured with

	define(`confQUEUE_LA', `16')
	define(`confREFUSE_LA', `20')

and the problems went away; mimedefang was able to keep the
system loaded and the perl slaves busy without sendmail backing
off inappropriately.  You'll need to understand how load averages
work on your system to make much sense of this.

Good luck and keep hacking.

	-- Wes