Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2731 mails)

[Charles Philip Chan <cpchan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 23:59:23 +0200
H du Plooy <linuser@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Whenever I download lots of e-mail at a time, I notice my system gets
> slower and less responsive, sometimes so bad that apps like evolution
> and mozilla seem to freeze until the mail is delivered.

Yes, spamassassin scans are very disk and resource intensive. However
you can improve you system response by:

(1) Using spamd/spamc combo instead of spamassassin.

(2) Use a lock file to make sure only one message is process at a time.

(3) Limit the size of the mail scanned since spam messages are small.

For example:

# The lock file ensures that only 1 spamassassin invocation happens
# at 1 time, to keep the load down.
#
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
#
# Limit size to 250 KB 
* < 256000
#
# Use spamc
| spamc -d 127.0.0.1 -f -u <your_user_name>

> Today I realised that it's the hard drive that's going bezerk when I'm
> downloading mail.

You can improve this by using 

hdparm -i <device>

to find out the highest transfer mode your hard drive support and then
use hdparm to set it to the highest mode both your system and hard drive
will allow. You might want to enable 32 bit file transfer, etc. For
example:

/sbin/hdparm -d1 -m16 -X udma2 -u1 -W1 -A1 -c3 -k1 /dev/hda

Please refer to the hdparm manpage.

> It's not a slow drive, at least not slow enough that the colletive
> size of the mail should tax it.

A faster drive does make difference. I had the same problem as you do
with my old drive. Tuning helped a little bit, but problem remains when
that is a lot of mail. However, the problem immediately went away after
I installed my new 80 GB "WD Caviar Special Edition" with 8Mb cache.

Charles

-- 
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good
excuse
for some of the brain-damages of minix.
(Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum)

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