Re: Suddenly load average of 15-18???

[Thomas Cameron]

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 10:53 -0500, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (May 12), Thomas Cameron said:
> > spamc is suddenly bringing my mail server to its knees.
> > 
> > Running RHEL 4 with the spamassassin-3.0.1-0.EL4 (supplied by Red Hat) and 
> > spamass-milter-0.3.0-3 (I made that RPM) along with razor-agents-2.67-0, 
> > dcc-1.3.0-0 and pyzor-0.4.0-0.
> > 
> > All of a sudden about two days ago spamc processes were chewing up
> > the machine - sendmail was actually rejecting messages because the
> > load average was so high!  This is a machine that is only used for
> > about 6 users...  It only handles around a thousand to two thousand
> > messages a day.  I am the only admin on it and nothing has changed.
> 
> What's the average processing time for a message, and are you using any
> -i flags on your spamass-milter commandline?  Grep your maillog for 
> "in .* seconds," to get the timings.  If they're all under 10 seconds
> or so and you're not using -i, check for things like mail loops, or
> large outgoing mail bursts.  

It was up around 50-60 seconds per message.  I rebooted the machine and
it has cleared up.

Thanks for the help!

Thomas