Mon Jun 2 16:52:13 PDT 2003 — Sundry Updates to DNS, Authentication and SpamAssassin. We were able to track down the sources of the periodic problems with our DNS servers and made some changes that appear to have resolved the problems. The DNS server failures were also causing cascading failures on our mail and authentication servers. We’ve taken additional measures to insulate these services from failures of our core DNS servers. We’ll still be going ahead with the DNS server upgrades and replacement.
We also did some profiling and performance tuning on our SpamAssassin cluster and were able to drive the average time to inspect a message down to half a second from between 2 to 6 seconds. This marked increase in performance should result in snappier email delivery and less load on our core mail servers. -Kelsey and Nathan