Topic: Server spec - stuff thats useful to know ...

[smeghead]

Hi all

Just been through a major headache with a clients server and thought I might pass on my experiences to save someone the same grief.

Server is PIII 500 128MB RAM & 8GB HDD.

Been working fine under 5.6 & 6.0 for over a year but today just seemingly 'died'.

After much messing around it turned out that CLAM was locking up cos the server was undergoing a concerted spam attack and virus flood combined.  The cause of the lockup was that the server max'd out its RAM and the kernel 'curled up its toes'.

After much testingit turned out that with a 512/128 ADSL using Standard mailserver Clam 0.70 & Spamaassassin the system needed a max of 480MB RAM.  If this is all real ram not swap the server slows noticably when flooded but recovers fairly quickly.

Base line is if you want to avoid this sorta drama use 512MB in even a modest server (or try out Gordons' mailfront contrib - gotta make some time to do this).

HTH

[meanlocha]

Your friends server is a minimum configuration.
Spamassassin clogs minimum configurations
pretty fast once it starts chewing on more than
2 email messages at a time.
You could try changing /etc/sysconfig/spamd
to contain the following (and restart /etc/init.d/spamc):

OPTIONS="-d -m2"

it will prevent the spamd daemon from running
more than 2 processes at a time although
it will also severely limit email
throughput.

Anthony

[Bugi]

Thanks! The mails were from people on my http://getaudios.topcities.com allow list...

[shanen]

You are right...
I found out the hard way that 128 or 256 is not enough for virus/spam toasters.
Ram is cheap enough so you are better to over engineer in this respect and sleep at night.

[penguinzrool]

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but saw this and thought it might apply to my server.

Am running SME 6.0.1 on a VIA Epia ITX motherboard with a 533 CPU with 256MB RAM as a basic server to do file and printer sharing to 3 PCs, work as an email server and host a website. It runs beautifully, if a little slowly at times. The only thing which is obviously slow is email processing. Looking through ps -aux and top, I seem to have a lot of spamd processes running, eating up lots of memory. As this box only processes around 10-20 emails per day, can I reduce these processes and save on the memory?

I saw something about adding some flags to /etc/sysconfig/spamd but this didn't work. I found changing the name of the file to /etc/sysconfig/spamassassin to match the entry in init.d seemed to work initially, but the processes are multiplying again and are back to 5 child processes.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[raem]

In case users have not seen or become aware of some very useful tweaks to get control of your sme server, re email & spam & memory & processes etc see the tips outlined in this thread, which will tame clam & spam processes.
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=26520.0

and for tips about taming qmail & spam see my post here
/var/service/smtpfront-qmail/runenv/Concurrency
see http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=25927.msg107677#msg107677

Feedback welcome re your experiences with these config tweaks.