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List:       qmail-scanner-general
Subject:    Re: [Qmail-scanner-general]high load average
From:       qmail-scanner () anastrophe ! com
Date:       2003-10-28 0:49:13
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At 03:43 PM 10/27/2003, Jeff Koch wrote:
>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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