Hey all, new to the list here. Our setup here at work is an amavis setup to filter mail for many domains and emails (typical isp-like environment). What happens ocassionally is that incoming mail will spike and then the mail queue starts to grow. Amavis processing becomes more sporatic, it starts taking way longer to do mail processing, say, 30-80 seconds instead of the 300-700ms that it takes on off-peak times.
I have it set to have 4 child processes, and it seems that all 4 will work fine for say, 10-30 seconds, and the mailq will go down, then one of these processes goes to 100% cpu usage, the others go to 0%, and the mailq starts going up. This stays like this for the 30-80 seconds and then it goes back to "normal" processing with timing back down low and all children chugging away happily. Then after N seconds one process locks it all up. While things are locked up the load on the server is up in the 2-3+ level. Normally it is under 2 (right now it's sitting at 1.64 with almost nothing in the mailq). There doesn't seem to be a correlation between message size (via the postfix logs) and the length of time, or some sort of spam bomb via looking for lots of decompose notices in the amavis.log. SETUP: Servers: Debian stable on HT 2.8G server hardware with 1G of ram Server 1: Postfix (2.3.3-1) | does rbl checks and forwards to the scanning server | V Server 2: Amavisd-new (20030616p10-5) | Spamassassin (2.0.3-2sarge) | Clamav (0.88.6-0volatile1) V Server 3: lmtp connection to a a cyrus server for our clients to retrieve. Our servers are processing about 250k messages a day, with about 50-60k of those not blocked by RBLs in postfix and being processed by amavis (based on the last few days of log files anyway). Things seem to have gotten worse lately and we see these spikes of up to 5000-12000 messages in the active queue more and more often. The spikes mean that mail delivery is delayed for several hours in some cases, leading to none-too-happy clients. Our only option in these cases seem to be to either ride it out or disabled SA processing and letting the spam through. I've tweaked out SA as much as I know how, disabling the blacklist config files, disabling any network checks (pyzor, razor, etc). Also have gone through the SA and amavis wikis performace improvement pages. I'm hoping that someone can suggest why this pausing happens. Log messages: Here's a couple of examples of super log amavis log. Jan 2 07:47:43 mx2.host.net amavisd-new[6149]: (06149-26) TIMING [total 80820 ms] - SMTP EHLO: 1 (0%), SMTP pre-MAIL: 0 (0 %), SMTP pre-DATA-flush: 1 (0%), SMTP DATA: 80 (0%), body hash: 0 (0%), %mime_decode: 15 (0%), get-file-type: 12 (0%), get-file -type: 10 (0%), get-file-type: 11 (0%), get-file-type: 11 (0%), decompose_part: 1 (0%), decompose_part: 0 (0%), decompose_part : 0 (0%), decompose_part: 0 (0%), parts: 0 (0%), AV-scan-1: 6 (0%), SA msg read: 2 (0%), SA parse: 2 (0%), SA check: 80539 (10 0%), fwd-connect: 4 (0%), fwd-mail-from: 2 (0%), fwd-rcpt-to: 3 (0%), write-header: 3 (0%), fwd-data: 1 (0%), fwd-data-end: 49 (0%), fwd-rundown: 1 (0%), fwd-connect: 5 (0%), fwd-mail-from: 2 (0%), fwd-rcpt-to: 4 (0%), write-header: 2 (0%), fwd-data: 0 (0%), fwd-data-end: 49 (0%), fwd-rundown: 1 (0%), unlink-4-files: 2 (0%), rundown: 0 (0%) Jan 2 10:19:24 mx2.host.net amavisd-new[27544]: (27544-16) TIMING [total 480137 ms] - SMTP EHLO: 1 (0%), SMTP pre-MAIL: 0 (0%), SMTP pre-DATA-flush: 2 (0%), SMTP DATA: 36 (0%), body hash: 0 (0%), mime_decode: 9 (0%), get-file-type: 14 (0%), decompo se_part: 1 (0%), parts: 0 (0%), AV-scan-1: 11 (0%), SA msg read: 3 (0%), SA parse: 3 (0%), SA check: 479182 (100%), fwd-connec t: 8 (0%), fwd-mail-from: 235 (0%), fwd-rcpt-to: 26 (0%), write-header: 3 (0%), fwd-data: 0 (0%), fwd-data-end: 519 (0%), fwd- rundown: 1 (0%), unlink-1-files: 79 (0%), rundown: 2 (0%) I realize that the versions of the software are pretty old, and I'm working on getting new versions deployed (a tricky situation when this is the mail infrastructure for several thousand users :) If anyone can give me a hand I'd really appreciate it. TIA Alan -- Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://arcterex.net -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Backups are for people who don't pray." -- big Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ AMaViS-user mailing list AMaViS-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amavis-user AMaViS-FAQ:http://www.amavis.org/amavis-faq.php3 AMaViS-HowTos:http://www.amavis.org/howto/
