Author: paul.mcilfatrick Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [exim] Some advice with Exim parameters to stop throughput
reducing to a trickle
>> As the part-time admin of an MTA I would appreciate some advice on >> what values to use for Exim's parameters to stop throughput reducing
>> to a trickle.
>[snip]
>> About 99% of all our e-mails arrive from two company edge servers and >> total received is about 20,000 e-mails per day with only around 1,000 >> of genuine e-mails and the rest being SPAM.
>[snip]
>> Arriving in this morning I issued the top command and it showed 13
>> exim-4.63-4 processes, all sleeping, and only 0.4% user cpu usage
>> (this is usually more than 50%).
>[snip] > Do you have many many messages in your queue (exim -bpc)? Are you
> trying to bounce those 20000 spam emails (exim -bp)? Can you verify
> in the log file that new queue runners are being spawned? What does
> exiwhat tell you those processes are doing? Is clamd/spamd still
> running and responding to a PING on the socket?
No messages were in the queue and the mainlog shows that the queue
runners were starting every 5 minutes but ending immediately.
I have ACLs set up to remove as many e-mails as possible but all that
remain are passed through SpamAssassin (sa-exim). All e-mails with a
SpamAssassin score of 5.0 or over is not delivered but put in directory
for 10 days before being deleted.
My suspicions are that the problem is to do with SpamAssassin's Bayesian
engine as I do a sa-learn of around 1000 SPAM submitted by users at the
start of each month. The problem of performance started around 3 or 4
months ago probably when some SPAM threshold was reached and it has been
getting worse ever since.
Yesterday I set up the mailhost Solaris box to reboot every evening and
I will monitor how the system performs.
