Optimizing MailScanner

Our MailScanner installation is pretty heavily utilised, scanning 20,000+ messages a day. I’m always looking for ways of improving it’s performance, so the following document has proved useful:

Optimization tips

1. Use a ramdisk (tmpfs) for MailScanner’s working directory.
2. Make sure you have enough ram
3. Set the noatime flag on your spool and log partitions
4. Use a local DNS caching nameserver
5. No syncs on logs
6. Use DCC as a daemon
7. Tweak your # of max child processes
8. Running your own copy of RBLs, and servers for DCC, Pyzor and Razor
9. Consider dropping unknown recipient emails on the inbound MailScanner MTA