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Date:      Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:53:54 -0400
From:      "Will Saxon" <WillS@housing.ufl.edu>
To:        "Ronald Klop" <ronald-freebsd8@klop.yi.org>, <stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Disk 100% busy
Message-ID:  <0E972CEE334BFE4291CD07E056C76ED807738007@bragi.housing.ufl.edu>

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-----Original Message-----
From:	Ronald Klop [mailto:ronald-freebsd8@klop.yi.org]
Sent:	Sun 2005-10-16 12:40
To:	Will Saxon; stable@freebsd.org
Cc:=09
Subject:	Re: Disk 100% busy

> On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 15:16:34 +0200, Will Saxon <WillS@housing.ufl.edu> =
=20
> wrote:
>=20
> > I am trying to diagnose a problem whereby a virus scanner (clam
> > antivirus) is taking too long to scan attachments on a mail server. =
We
> > have an attachment limitation of 20MB and an attachment of 7-20MB =
can
> > take over 3 minutes to scan. This often causes the sending mail =
server
> > to timeout and resend the mail.
> >
> > In this case, my mail gateway is is a dual 3.06GHz Xeon with 1GB of =
ram
> > and 2 36GB 15krpm drives in a raid-1 on a smart array 6i (cciss)
> > controller. I am running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p1.
> >
> > Systat -vmstat reports the disk mirror is 100% busy at all times on =
this
> > machine, with an average of around 300 tps at 15KB/t. This seems =
wrong
> > to me, as these numbers are maintained even when the system doesn't
> > otherwise appear busy. We don't seem to be swamped by log writes. =
How
> > can I tell what's generating these disk writes? At the moment the =
100%
> > disk utilization is the only thing I can see that would cause the
> > scanning delay. The machine overall is sluggish with file =
operations.

> How many e-mails do you process every second/minute?
> Do you use softupdates are is the filesystem mounted 'sync'.
> Change the mailserver to first accept the message, then scan it, then  =

> deliver it. In that case you have much more control over how many =
messages =20
> are scanned at the same time, etc..

I completely forgot that I had the partition mounted 'sync'. That might =
explain things a bit, huh.=20

I am using qmail - the author indicates that softupdates is not =
recommended. However, I am going to give it a shot and see if I start =
losing mail as he suggests may happen.

Thanks for answering!

-Will



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