On Son, 2010-09-05 at 17:44 -0500, Chris wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-09-05 at 12:54 -0700, John Hardin wrote:
> > On Sun, 5 Sep 2010, Chris wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, 2010-09-05 at 12:33 -0500, Len Conrad wrote:
> > >>> Mem: 772880k total, 685316k used, 87564k free, 31344k buffers
> > >>> Swap: 1076312k total, 249032k used, 827280k free, 156328k cached
> > >>
> > >> 250MB swapped, for less than 1 GB RAM, used is disastrous for an MTA.
> > >>
> > >> Increase RAM to 2GB, or until swap is always "0k used"
> > >
> > > It's just a single user home system. True, I probably do need to
> > > increase ram but I 'don't' think this has a bearing on this issue though
> > > I may be wrong.
> >
> > Your system is swapping. That kills performance, pretty much across the
> > board. Either buy more memory or accept the impact of an underprovisioned
> > machine on the performance of mail delivery.
> >
> > Do you really need your mail to be delivered _that_ promptly? If
> > interactive performance is acceptable then what does it matter if an email
> > (delivered in the background) takes 30 seconds or 300 seconds to be
> > stuffed into your inbox?
>
> Thanks for the input John, I can accept 30 or 45 seconds of drive access
> however when it comes to 300 I can't accept that. And you're absolutely
If it's really drive access, it smells like trashing (or you have an
awfully and incredibly slow I/O subsystem).
5 minutes is almost zero in the email world. SMTP never was real-time
anyway.
> correct, the problem is my lack of memory I realize that now.
How many of the various daemons (spamd, clamd, mimedefang, MTAs) do you
run (even potentially) in parallel?
And how much (unshared) RSS do they take?
Just limit that to, say 2 or 3 of each, if only to avoid trashing.
FWIW I had a similar situation (on much larger hardware. But running 80
mimedefang processes in parallel doesn't make too much sense anyways -
even with 4 CPUs).
Bernd
--
Bernd Petrovitsch Email : be...@petrovitsch.priv.at
LUGA : http://www.luga.at
