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Date:      Fri, 09 May 2008 17:27:41 -0400
From:      DAve <dave.list@pixelhammer.com>
To:        User Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Message-ID:  <4824C1CD.4040006@pixelhammer.com>
In-Reply-To: <DFCF3BED-202A-431F-99F4-3FF82E662BA3@mac.com>
References:  <482473B7.7070707@pixelhammer.com>	<48248AC9.5060507@infracaninophile.co.uk>	<20080509202941.J53368@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>	<9F98C32F-0DA0-40F9-B82B-4866F3D600CB@mac.com>	<48249E0A.8080709@pixelhammer.com> <DFCF3BED-202A-431F-99F4-3FF82E662BA3@mac.com>

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Chuck Swiger wrote:
> On May 9, 2008, at 11:55 AM, DAve wrote:
>>> For single-processor systems, FreeBSD 4.11 does very well at a lot of 
>>> tasks.  However, Dave apparently has a 4-CPU system (~8 threads if he 
>>> enabled hyperthreading), and for real SMP hardware, more recent 
>>> versions of FreeBSD generally perform better than 4.x would.
>>
>> Single CPU quad core.
> 
> OK.
> 
>> ps -aux output is up, look under the FBSD dir. I also put up both 
>> dmesg.boot files from the servers.
> 
> MailScanner is what is taking up all of the load; tuning that area is 
> where you need to focus.
> 
> Things which come to mind are trying to limit the max number of children 
> of that being run to something smaller, perhaps 8 or so.  Yes, they 
> recommend running 5 * #CPUs, but they also think their instances are 
> going to be around 20MB in size, but yours are running at 100+ MB size.
> 
> You might find that running sa-update and sa-compile nightly might 
> improve your SpamAssassin performance; I've got a crontab setup which 
> runs the following nightly:
> 
> % cat /usr/local/bin/update-spamassassin
> #! /bin/sh
> 
> PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
> 
> sa-update --allowplugins --gpgkey 
> D1C035168C1EBC08464946DA258CDB3ABDE9DC10 --channel 
> saupdates.openprotect.com --channel updates.spamassassin.org
> sa-compile
> 
> kill -HUP `cat /var/run/vscan/spamd.pid`
> 
> (If you aren't running spamd because MailScanner uses builtin interface 
> to SpamAssassin, comment out the last line.  But do check the sa-compile 
> docs, you have to make a change for it to be used....)
> 
> Regards,

I appologize I should have given more info.

We do run sa-update, and sa-compile. We also run 0 scores on most DNSBL 
tests as we run those at the mta level along with milter-greylist, 
milter-ahead, pipelining rejection, and greet pause. We have been 
running a very trimmed down and fine tuned system for about two years 
now with good results. I do think the upgrade to SA 3.2.4 is very heavy, 
considerably more resource usage than 3.1.8 which we were running prior 
to the OS upgrade.

I have not changed the settings for MailScanner from our previous 
install with respect to number of children or to batch size. Previous 
testing showed that 13 MS children with a batch size of 10 messages was 
optimal. I can certainly give that a try.  I will look at enabling 
Hyperthreading as well.

I've also found this, which may be a clue to the suggestion that a 
binary upgrade to 6.3 was a solution.

DAve
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/070986.html

-- 
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