Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

I’m sure some of you have noticed that I’m experiencing occassional server problems. The host I’m on has been overtaxed, mostly due to spammer activity (both web and email varieties). There are times when the server load spikes up into the 20s, which is ridiculously high. To combat the problem, I set up a cron job which monitors the load level, and restarts apache and mysql when it goes above a certain threshold. However, for some reason, the mysql database server sometimes fails to restart properly. I’ve just added another monitor program which should fix that, so the database should never stay down for more than a couple of minutes. I still need to put something in place to do something more proactive about the email spam, though. Part of the problem there is that the volume of spam email is causing SpamAssassin and procmail to hog the CPU. I may need to enable some of the more aggressive SpamAssassin features.

I’ve been told that we’ll be getting some new hardware soon, so hopefully things will settle down more when that happens. It should also give me an opportunity to do some better performing tuning for the server.