[Mimedefang] right value for MX_MAXIMUM

[Kevin A. McGrail]

On 6/24/2015 7:43 AM, Muthu N.C wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am having the system with sendmail, mimedefang and spamassassin.
> Mimedefang is running with the below options.
>
> -m 2 -x 80 -y 0 -U defang -b 300 -l
>
> MX_MINIMUM=2
> MX_MAXIMUM=80
> #MX_QUEUE_SIZE=10
>
> In a day I am getting the below error multiple times. By looking at
> the md-mx-ctrl rawstats, all the 80 slaves are busy at that time. We
> are receiving around 500 e-mails in a minute.
>
> mimedefang-multiplexor[2500]: No free slaves
> mimedefang[2517]: t5O6odRs007105: Error from multiplexor: error: No free slaves
>
> How much slaves should be set for this workload?
> Would increasing the MX_QUEUE_SIZE help, how much I can increase?
> Any other suggestions to overcome this issue?
> I read that the e-mails sent during this time would be retried by the
> other MTA automatically, but I am seeing it as lost.
There are a lot of variables for this.  Are you doing spam processing, 
av processing, etc. How many processors? How much ram? There is no magic 
formula but it sounds like you need more.

I would turn on the timing for mimedefang (-T) option and look at how 
long a message takes to process.  Then I would likely look at what I 
could do to reduce that...

Regards,
KAM