Our mailserver running qmail-scanner/SA runs at a Load Average of about 0.90 and sometimes hits 2.00. However, the CPU is still 95% idle. Can someone explain what load average means and how we can use more of the CPU in order to get greater throughput. We're using a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1.0GB of RAM.
these queries fall more into the general unix category than qmail-scanner. however. load average is a measure of the number of processes in the run queue. it's not specifically tied to CPU, not at all. if a process is blocked waiting on I/O, it'll add to the load average, even though it's not waiting on CPU cycles, it's waiting on I/O cycles.
your bottleneck is most likely disk I/O. what's your disk configuration? how many messages are you processing at one time (generally determined by your /var/qmail/control/concurrency[local/remote] values).
i can pretty easily make my qmail-scanner/SA/clamav server's load average go up and down at will by just increasing the number of concurrent connections it can receive from my primary MX. i keep my load average around 8 or 9, and that's with a maximum seven concurrent connections from the primary MX.
but this is a much lower end machine than yours - sun netra T1, 360Mhz, 512M ram. and i only process about 1,000 messages per hour.
Paul Theodoropoulos http://www.anastrophe.com
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