Amavis Hiccups?

Hello,

I have installed and using amavisd-new for about 1 year
now.
It is been great since the installation.
But I noticed sometimes that Amavis is having hiccups and
during the hiccups
the email delivery is delayed.
Postfix is accepting lot of messages and it defers couple of
thousands
messages during this amavis hiccup time.
As I paste my top screen, load average during the hiccups is
normal (I have
4 cores in that machine)
And I am using tmpfs for /var/amavis/tmp folder.
Is there something that I am missing? or is this okay to
have hiccups?
Can someone please help me on this one?

Thank you

Justin


top - 13:06:17 up 20 days, 12:33,  1 user,  load average:
1.50, 2.04, 2.35
Tasks: 360 total,   2 running, 358 sleeping,   0 stopped,  
0 zombie
Cpu(s): 18.3% us,  2.4% sy,  0.0% ni, 69.8% id,  9.4% wa, 
0.0% hi,  0.1% si
Mem:   8164752k total,  8019976k used,   144776k free,  
795188k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,      160k used,  2031448k free, 
4005680k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ 
COMMAND
19243 amavis    18   0  177m  70m 3388 R   64  0.9   5:26.98
amavisd
(ch1-19243-01-4)
17579 amavis    15   0  180m  73m 3436 S    5  0.9   0:02.64
amavisd
(ch2-17579-02-7)
 3234 root      15   0 30916 1996 1540 S    1  0.0 362:08.33
dovecot-auth -w
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At 03:29 PM 8/24/2007, Justin Kim wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I have installed and using amavisd-new for about 1 year
now.
>It is been great since the installation.
>But I noticed sometimes that Amavis is having hiccups
and during the hiccups
>the email delivery is delayed.
>Postfix is accepting lot of messages and it defers
couple of thousands
>messages during this amavis hiccup time.

What do you mean by hiccup?  Is amavisd-new unable to accept

connections from postfix?  Does amavisd-new stop running and
must be 
restarted?  Is amavisd-new taking an unreasonably long time
to 
process messages at times?  Something else?  Hiccup is not
very 
descriptive for trouble shooting.

Top output is not very useful here.  Show logs. 
amavisd-nanny and/or 
amavisd-agent might also provide useful information, but the
logs are 
the place to start.


-- 
Noel Jones 


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Justin,

Noel Jones wrote:
> Top output is not very useful here.  Show logs. 
amavisd-nanny and/or
> amavisd-agent might also provide useful information,
but the logs are
> the place to start.

Indeed.

- A TIMING log entry at log level 2 is one thing
  to look for.

- the other is setting a:
    $nanny_details_level = 2;
  and looking at amavisd-nanny running display
  ('amavisd-nanny -h' shows a legend).

- the third are TimeElapsed* lines as reported
  by amavisd-agent.

There are many possible reasons for a slowdown,
could be a bayes database autoexpiration, could be
one of DNS servers being down, not responding to
RBL/DNSURI/Razor/Pyzor/Dcc requests, ...
Some of us find the rbl_timeout default of 15 seconds
to be too high. Also, make sure your DNS resolver and
your network connectivity is in good shape.
If using SQL logging (PenPals), perhaps a database
needs maintenance (purging/optimizing).

  Mark

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