[Linux-Discussion] Tip: syslogd
- From: John Madden <weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: linux-discussion@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 15:40:13 -0500
Just a quick tip for anyone sending a lot of email or something: I noticed
on avenir.dhs.org (the box that runs FreeLists, of course) that syslogd
would soak up a lot more cpu than even postfix, which does all the mail
processing and sending (the MTA).
I started asking around on the postfix-users mailing list for tips on how
to prevent postfix from sending so much log data to syslogd, but instead I
got answers on how to improve syslogd. :)
Basically, the problem is that syslogd will write to syslog and messages
(filenames differ depending on your distribution) constantly (by default),
which can cause some I/O issues if there's a lot going on on your disk(s),
especially if you use IDE.
The trick is to edit /etc/syslog.conf and put a '-' dash in front of the
filenames that are being written to. So for example, you may now have
*.=info;*.=notice -/usr/adm/messages
in there. This forces asynchronous writes on the log file(s) you specify,
which helps a LOT with performance. Where syslogd was typically taking up
5-9% of the cpu, it now runs at about 0.1-0.3%. That's quite an
improvement, and since FreeLists can end up sending out a peak of about
30,000 emails a day (rough estimate there), that little bit helps a great
deal.
John
--
# John Madden weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ICQ: 2EB9EA
# UNIX Systems Engineer, Ivy Tech State College
# FreeLists, Free mailing lists for all: //www.freelists.org
# Sys-Admin / Webmaster, Avenir Web: http://avenir.dhs.org
# Linux, Apache, Perl and C: All the best things in life are free!
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