I operate a shell server with about 200 users. Spamassassin powers the machine, and users use sa-learn to teach it about spam and ham. The machine receives about 5-20 mails per second and the hardware keeps the load between 0.15 and 0.30. Every now and then, coincidence will have it that 10 or 20 users invoke spamassassin at the same time. Spamassassin is a resource hog and that will cause the machine to basically become unusable, with the load going to 30 and higher. It usually takes it about half an hour to get back to a usable state (after all backup MX delivered the queued mail, causing it to receive up to 30 mails per second. Obviously, I have put limits on local deliveries so that postfix itself does not ever screw up the machine. Now I need to limit the local users. Other than PAM limits, which seems to only work on number of processes, is there a way to dynamically limit the load a shell-user can cause? I am talking load-balancing ... give each user 100% unless others want slices too. Do you know of a solution I could employ? Thanks, -- Please do not CC me when replying to lists; I read them! .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
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