Rick DeNatale wrote:
> Except... occasionally when a lot of mail comes in, my workstation
> seems to lose interest in what I'm doing, and telnetting in from
> another machine and running top indicates that spamd is getting most
> of the CPU cycles.
Strange. I've yet to see anything like this on the filter server I'm
adminning unless a *very* heavy concurrent load comes up- several long
POP3 sessions, several heavy HTTPS webmail sessions, and a mail spike
from the inbound relay (running qmail). This on a single-cpu box. The
system load average typically hits ~5+ before I notice *any* kind of
slowdown in shell sessions.
> So I'm thinking about offloading at least some of my mail processing
> to another machine. I've got a 386 based machine
...
> Frodo is an smp 686 machine, whereas clavin is a 386 (Cyrix) machine.
Ooog. I don't think you really want to do this... You'll MASSIVELY
slow down your mail processing. What CPUs do you have in frodo? How
much memory?
In your situation I'd renice spamd down so it doesn't hog the CPU so
much. The other thing to look at is TCP/IP socket vs Unix socket for
your spamc<->spamd connection; I noticed at bit of a speed improvement
(~5%) on the filter server here. You might also try renicing your own
GUI/shell processes up so that they have a higher priority.
Check out your swap status when this happens- if you end up swapping
while spamc/spamd are processing, this is known to potentially cause a
system to go into a death spiral occasionally and (worst case) trigger
the kernel's out-of-memory process killer.
> The question which is most relevant to this list, is how do I
> move/copy the SA installation from frodo to clavin and preserve the
> bayes learning?
Quite aside from the issue of "Will this work/Is this a good idea?", you
should just be able to copy your ~/.spamassassin directory from one box
to the other. Since they're running the same RedHat release, you don't
have any problems converting from one DB_File/libdb version to another.
(I had to do some ugly hacking to move the filter server from RH to
Debian; the libdb/DB_File in Debian didn't know what to do with the
Bayes db files created on RH.)
You *may* end up with some oddness if/when you upgrade to Fedora; I
don't know how much the libdb/DB_File setup has changed.
> Here's what I'm running on frodo now:
> fetchmail runs as a cron job and gets isp mail from my account and my
> wife's account every 10 minutes. fetchmailrc passes it through spamc.
As far as I understand it, this sort of setup is VERY linear in its
processing. On a dual box, you shouldn't see any trouble at all. (My
own personal server is a dual PII/266; I've occasionally had long
compiles/package builds running in different remote SSH sessions,
connections open to my server at home, and mail flying in from the
backup MX because I did something stupid that left sendmail rejecting
connections for half a day- and still no obvious slowdown in another SSH
session open to check on something else.
> Is my best bet to just run spamd on clavin, and leave everything else
> back on frodo?
Personally, I wouldn't bother; I'd look at why spamc seems to be
killing everything else on the system in the first place. That
*definitely* looks fishy to me; POP3 is a very linear protocol and I
can't see why a dual-CPU system of any flavour should bog down
processing a POP3-originated mail stream.
> Spamc does support this via the -host arg doesn't it?
The argument is -d {spamdhost}, but, yes.
-kgd
--
"Sendmail administration is not black magic. There are legitimate
technical reasons why it requires the sacrificing of a live chicken."
- Unknown
