Milter-greylist

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 10:45:40AM +0000, David Lee wrote:
> ... (dual opteron, hyper-threaded) machines, ...

AMD never made any CPUs with hyper-threading support.

> The size of "greylist.db" on disk is around 250MB (quarter GB),
> representing about 2,000,000 entries.

You can probably reduce the size of that database by whitelisting the
e-mail servers of popular services like AOL, eBay, Googemail, Yahoo etc..
Or you can use milter-greylist 3.0RC7 and only greylist certain
system e.g. hosts with dynamically assigned IP addresses.

> (So does that mean that milter-greylist is threaded?).

A milters are threaded because that's how the API works.

> But I'm still getting lots of these errors (this time as a triple):
>    [...]: Milter (greylist): timeout before data read
>    [...]: Milter (greylist): to error state
>    [...]: Milter: to=<xxx.yyy@...>, reject=451 4.3.2 Please try again later

Do you SPF? I see such errors if the DNS query for SPF takes too long.
It does however not really matter on my configuration because the
DNS problem usually indicates spam anyway.

> 3. The constant 100% CPU seems high: is there some inefficiency in the
> searching?

IIRC milter-greylist 3.0RC<x> uses hashes to speed up searching.

> 3. If not already threaded, could it be made so, particularly the update
> onto the "greylist.db" disk file?

It is done by a single thread and changing that is hard and probably not
going to improve dump performance a lot.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/