mail load and spam/virus checking curiosity
I have a curiosity. O:-) On my home system, where I connect through a modem and download my email with fetchmail, and pass it to postfix + procmail + SpamAssassin + amavis, I see that the system load goes up to almost 100%, and there is a delay in the mail queue of 30..60 emails (from this list most of them, thus, small). And this is a P-IV @ 1800 with 750 Mb ram, not a slow system. What would the impact of that be on a bigger server, say, a business one? Is it worse, or perhaps better, because it is not so concentrated (no fetchmail)? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
Quoting Carlos E. R.
I have a curiosity. O:-)
On my home system, where I connect through a modem and download my email with fetchmail, and pass it to postfix + procmail + SpamAssassin + amavis, I see that the system load goes up to almost 100%, and there is a delay in the mail queue of 30..60 emails (from this list most of them, thus, small). And this is a P-IV @ 1800 with 750 Mb ram, not a slow system.
What would the impact of that be on a bigger server, say, a business one? Is it worse, or perhaps better, because it is not so concentrated (no fetchmail)?
On my Athlon XP 1800+ with cable modem, SpamAssassin with RBLs and Razor enabled takes 11 seconds per message (elapsed time, not CPU time). If you have amavisd-new, try uncommenting "$sa_local_tests_only = 1;" in /etc/amavisd.conf and restarting it. Postfix will do the RBL checks more efficiently and Vipul's Razor is no longer useful against spam. Both introduce considerable latency while they connect across the Internet to servers. HTH, Jeffrey
The 03.06.16 at 09:10, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
On my Athlon XP 1800+ with cable modem, SpamAssassin with RBLs and Razor enabled takes 11 seconds per message (elapsed time, not CPU time).
My delay is about 30 seconds, but it doesn't worry me much: I just wondered what would happen on a big server, because each one I think sets up one or more child processes.
If you have amavisd-new, try uncommenting
No, just amavis-postfix. That one must come with suse 8.2, I still have 8.1
"$sa_local_tests_only = 1;" in /etc/amavisd.conf and restarting it. Postfix will do the RBL checks more efficiently and Vipul's Razor is no longer useful against spam. Both introduce considerable latency while they connect across the Internet to servers.
I'll note this for the future, when I upgrade, thanks. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
* Carlos E. R. (robin1.listas@tiscali.es) [030616 16:09]:
My delay is about 30 seconds, but it doesn't worry me much: I just wondered what would happen on a big server, because each one I think sets up one or more child processes.
I don't imagine people have much running spamassasin on large mailservers even through there are lots of companies selling spam filtering that just use that. For large sites there are much better solutions like postini.com; you set your top two or three MX records to them and they handle it all (they don't use SA). -- -ckm
The 03.06.16 at 16:29, Christopher Mahmood wrote:
I don't imagine people have much running spamassasin on large mailservers even through there are lots of companies selling spam filtering that just use that. For large sites there are much better solutions like postini.com; you set your top two or three MX records to them and they handle it all (they don't use SA).
Makes sense. Although I think I read somewhere that Suse used spamassassin for their incoming email, maybe in a doc explaining how we should write email. But perhaps you are talking of bigger servers, ISP types? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
* Carlos E. R. (robin1.listas@tiscali.es) [030617 03:20]:
Makes sense. Although I think I read somewhere that Suse used spamassassin for their incoming email, maybe in a doc explaining how we should write email. But perhaps you are talking of bigger servers, ISP types?
We use it on a couple of the internal imap servers and we're experimenting with it on the ticketing that receive the customer service mail but it's far too much mail to run it on the MXs. Even with the generous estimate of SA adding +1sec to processing that translates to dozens of additional servers when talking about large amounts of mail; Postini, the spam filtering company I mentioned early, handles something like 1000 mails per second. -- -ckm
Quoting Carlos E. R.
The 03.06.16 at 09:10, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
On my Athlon XP 1800+ with cable modem, SpamAssassin with RBLs and Razor enabled takes 11 seconds per message (elapsed time, not CPU time).
My delay is about 30 seconds, but it doesn't worry me much: I just wondered what would happen on a big server, because each one I think sets up one or more child processes.
If you have amavisd-new, try uncommenting
No, just amavis-postfix. That one must come with suse 8.2, I still have 8.1
amavis-postfix is amavis configured for Postfix. If the description is correct and really is amavis, not one of the demonized versions, the startup costs of the Perl interpreter is being paid for each message. If it is in 8.1, switch to amavisd-postfix (note the d in the name).
"$sa_local_tests_only = 1;" in /etc/amavisd.conf and restarting it. Postfix will do the RBL checks more efficiently and Vipul's Razor is no longer useful against spam. Both introduce considerable latency while they connect across the Internet to servers.
I'll note this for the future, when I upgrade, thanks.
HTH, Jeffrey
The 03.06.16 at 22:53, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
amavis-postfix is amavis configured for Postfix. If the description is correct and really is amavis, not one of the demonized versions, the startup costs of the Perl interpreter is being paid for each message. If it is in 8.1, switch to amavisd-postfix (note the d in the name).
Makes sense; but there is no such file on the 8.1 distro. I'll wait till I upgrade to 8.2 one of theese weeks ;-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
participants (3)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Christopher Mahmood -
Jeffrey L. Taylor