Re: Suddenly load average of 15-18???

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (May 12), Thomas Cameron said:
> spamc is suddenly bringing my mail server to its knees.
> 
> Running RHEL 4 with the spamassassin-3.0.1-0.EL4 (supplied by Red Hat) and 
> spamass-milter-0.3.0-3 (I made that RPM) along with razor-agents-2.67-0, 
> dcc-1.3.0-0 and pyzor-0.4.0-0.
> 
> All of a sudden about two days ago spamc processes were chewing up
> the machine - sendmail was actually rejecting messages because the
> load average was so high!  This is a machine that is only used for
> about 6 users...  It only handles around a thousand to two thousand
> messages a day.  I am the only admin on it and nothing has changed.

What's the average processing time for a message, and are you using any
-i flags on your spamass-milter commandline?  Grep your maillog for 
"in .* seconds," to get the timings.  If they're all under 10 seconds
or so and you're not using -i, check for things like mail loops, or
large outgoing mail bursts.  

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden