Flashes of Panic

I came in this morning to find that our stolid little gateway server was refusing incoming and outgoing mail via SMTP. This is a defense mechanism: it shuts down the mail server when the load average gets too high. (Load average, for non-geeks, is a measure of how busy a computer is; usually it is given as three numbers, precise to two decimal places, which represent the average number of instructions waiting for the processor over the past one, five, and fifteen minutes. Since processors are usually able to deal with work pretty quickly, a desktop system generally has fractional load averages; a heavily loaded server shouldn’t get much over three, and at thirty the sysadmin begins to have trouble controlling the box because it won’t respond to commands.

(Heat issues also begin to crop up as the load average spikes: as the chip gets warmer, various materials on the board, such as connections and adhesives, reach temperatures where they can no longer do their jobs. So things pop loose, connections get sketchy, and some things solidify and crack. That’s why 733+ |-|aX0rz who overclock their Voodoo boxes have to liquid-cool the CPU.)

So coming in to numbers like this is alarming:

[root tools]# uptime
  9:44am  up 5 days, 23:25,  1 user,  load average: 21.63, 21.49, 21.24

Note that since the averages are for one, five, and fifteen, if they decrease from left to right, the load average is trending up.

In this case, the problem turned out to be a slew of zombie spamassassin processes.

Let me put the whole thing in terms more easily understood by non-geeks:

We got so much spam last night, the server choked on it.

This is the message none of the legislators who wrote (or watered down) that toothless piece of legislative masturbation known as the CAN-SPAM Act understood. Spammers are using the resources of others to spread their advertising message. And the load they are collectively placing on small businesses is bringing work to a halt. The day is going to come when we need to actually buy a high-powered, dedicated machine simply to handle email for a twenty-eight-employee office.

I laugh derisively at your economic stimulus package. Want to stimulate productivity in this country? Get the goddamned spammers off our backs.

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