Re: [exim] Exim+SA=Server Overloaded!

On Jan 24, 2006, at 9:01 AM, Eduardo wrote:

> Hello!
> Sorry to send another email about the same subject. But my mail
> server crashed so i couldn't see the answers.
>
> I am calling my spamassassin service in SMTP time with some ACL
> rules in my exim4 configuration file. I start the SA service, start
> exim4 service and i wait only some minutes and the server gets
> overloaded!... almost impossible to loggin and shutdown manually
> the server.
>
> I have 216 users in the server, and I have an avarege about 10
> access / minute.
>
> I THINK that the problem is that I am calling the SA service from
> ACL rules (in SMTP time)... but dont know how to change it to
> another way to fix the problem.
>
> Ah! When I turn off the SA service the server goes perfectly.
>


I am running FreeBSD, and my SMTP server is a "virtual server" (jail)
on a physical system that also does other things. There were some
particular perl processes that would periodically cause high load on
the server (not connected to mail but a buggy thing running inside a
customer "virtual server") and cause SA to start "backing up". (I
am using the excellent sa-exim from Marc Merlin to interface exim and
SA and also use sa-exim's greylist). I would get 30-50 spamd
running and they were all timing out. (This server does not process
that much mail -- 10-40 messages a minute). I already had an opteron
server running clamd and had almost no load on it. I installed the
latest SA there and have sa-exim pass off to the SA there. Now
everything runs really smoothly. So if you can offload your SA to a
dedicated server (mine I have running on an internal closed 192
subnet on a different nic) you will be able to reduce the resource
contention you experience on your machine.

best regards
Chad

---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad at shire.net