HELP !!!! My mail server is getting swamped

[ZombieBritts]

I have a mail server that is being maxed out by all of this effin spam.

Specs:

dual PIII 500 cpus
1 gig of ram
4 x 36 gig scsi drives (raid5)

RedHat 9 linux
Qmail
Spamassassin

we have 2 spamd daemons running .

70% of the time , the system is rocking.

the other 30% of the time , both cpu's are above 90% , the spamd's are the resource hogs.

When this happens , everything just crawls .

We are trying to tune the filters , but most of the rules are being used heavily.

Do I need more horsepower ? Should I get a bigger box ?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

[stathisx]

maybe you need a bigger box as you said...

[ZombieBritts]

any suggestions as to what makes a GREAT mail server box ?

[kkubasik]

I've run a mailserver on a weaker box than that, (of course, i only had like 15 accounts) How many people are you hosting? In addition, look at consolodating your rules, sometimes people have 3 filters stating very similar things, thats one rule that has to be applied as opposed to 3. if you need more juice, you could look at a distributive processing system like OpenMosix that way you don't waste that great computer you have now, just add another few machines that you have chillin around and it will place the spam assasin processes on seaprate machines, leaving the server free to handle mail, while its not too big a deal if the perifrial machines slowdown. I would love to use a system like this on a few old 400mz 128mbram machines i have lieing around.

[ZombieBritts]

We have about 200 emails for our company.

Thanks for the input and ideas. I will look at these options.

I would like to keep this topic open to see if other people have other great ideas that I can learn from.

[Mystic_Slayer]

If you have a dual p3 500 like i do. I have running a mailserver with 750 mail clients and also spam assasin. I don't get that high with my cpu. I use stable about 20 or 30% and also running http server and ftp server on it.

Which kernel do you use?

I'm running a

Dual p3 500
4 * 250 gb in raid 5
2 * 36,7 scsi disk in raid 1
1 gb memory

Debian met Linux kernel 2.6.4-2

[ZombieBritts]

Red Hat 2.4.20-31.9

[ZombieBritts]

what spam rules are you using ?

[Mystic_Slayer]

I should ask my colleague. Because he has defined the rules voor SpamAssassin. He's back tomorrow, maybe he can give you some advice about it.

But the only i know was that my systems are running perfectly also with spamassassin.