[Mimedefang] Puttting MIMEDefang spool on tmpfs

[Lisa Casey]

Hi,


>
> My gut reaction is that it would be better to find out _why_ MdF
> is red-llned, first.  I hope moving to a RAM fs will help, but given
> the relatively small memory size on Lisa's system, dedicating a chunck
> to tempfs will only increase memory pressure for MdF and the other things
> that run on that system.  If Lisa goes that route, it may be equally
> important to add more memory also.  But somehow, I think the problem
> may lie elsewhere.  Recall that in the first example Lisa gave that
> the system was getting bogged down at the wee hours of the AM.  Is there
> a cronjob that runs then?  Does it do something like age out old Bayes
> database entries or something else that might lock a critical resource,
> for example?
>

I think you've hit the crux of the matter here. You might remember that I
also mentioned that this box with it's Sendmail/Mimedefang has been working
fine up until weekend before last. That's when I started getting the error
messages in my log re mimedefang having no free slaves and when that
happened load averages shot up and Sendmail began refusing connections due
to the load average. When I brought mimedefang back up today, load averages
climbed back into the 30's within an hour and the box became sluggish almost
to the point of not being able to loog into it. It ran perfectly all weekend
(load averages consistently under 1.0) all weekend  with no mimedefang (but
lots of customer complaints about increased spam!).

Figuring out WHY mimedefang is suddenly shooting up the load averages when
it worked so well for quite some time is what I ought to do to slove the
problem. Knowing why will tell what the cause is.

I'm at home now but tomorrow I'll look at cron jobs, etc. What else should I
take a look at? There's nothing that I can  think of right off hand that I
have changed or added around that same time.

I got a quote on Canit today, unfortunately my company can't afford to go
that route just now  :-(  So Mimedefang/Spamasassin is going to have to be
it for me for now.

Lisa Casey


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