Anirudha, > >There is a $child_timeout setting, with a default value of 8*60 seconds, > > i.e. 8 minutes. It limits the total time for one mail message processing > > spent in amavisd. The sublimits (virus, spam, ... scans) are derived >> dynamically from $child_timeout and actual times spent so far. > > *So does this means, a particular email would be devoted a total time of 8 > mins by amavis or would it be more?*
Yes, processing should abort after $child_timeout seconds or slightly beyond that. This limit is much more precisely adhered to since 2.7.0, which makes it suitable for a pre-queue filtering setup (setting the $child_timeout to something like 45 seconds). With 2.6.* this is more like a best effort / advisory time limit. Still, even with 2.7.0, there may be cases (like evaluating a regexp of a SpamAssassin rule in some degenerate case), where the limit may be exceeded. SpamAssassin 3.3.* or 3.4.0 are much better behaved in this respect compared to SpamAssassin 3.2. Mark
