On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 01:18:59PM +0100, Mark Adams wrote: > I was hoping to draw from the pool of experience that the exim mailing > list has, as I realise this is a spamassassin or other issue. We are > running exim4.62-4 with Spamassassin 3.1.4-4 and suffering extremely > high IO Wait times on the server whenever spamassassin scans an incoming > email. Exim4 is setup as defaults (spamd running locally on standard > port) so no configuration was changed. Spamassassin has not had any > rules added to it. The server goes from 1-2% wait times spiking to > between 20-90% when spamd is scanning an email, this lasts for a few > seconds and then drops back down to normal. This is a system with raided > SATA drives on a LVG that also serves small SMB shares. It serves around > 40 mail users. > > I have not had this problem on servers with SCSI drives, or on servers > that use SATA but are strictly mail servers. > > Has anyone had this issue? any ideas appreciated.
Do you have auto-learn and SA's bayesian mode enabled? If so you may be seeing a lot of write activity from SA updating its dictionaries (especially if you're using the default GDBM back-end, which is very inefficient). To assist in diagnosing, you might want to install iostat or similar and see what pattern of activity (number of transactions, number of blocks read/written) you're seeing during mail scanning. -- ``It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.'' (Chic Murray) -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
