I've been running spamassassin on several boxes (home and work) over the past few weeks. It rocks. Completely replaced my own procmail spam detection recipies.
The problem I'm having as a dialup user is when I pull mail
periodically. With several hundred emails stacked up, I can readily run
into user process limits (256 processes per user) while handling mail.
My system uses:
- fetchmail (run daemonized from /etc/fetchmailrc on one system, run
manually on another) to pull mail from a POPD server.
- exim for local delivery.
- procmail for filtering
- spamassassin, as part of the procmail filters
- ricochet, a reporting script, for reporting highly-rated spam
automatically.
My typical process load is ~120-130 processes, single user, on the box.
When pulling mail, I'll see the system spike to 350 or more processes.
It appears that each mail delivery initiates a separate exim process
(which I hadn't expected) and procmail process (this I had).
Looking through references, it appears I can recompile my kernel to
increase user limits (defaults appear to be 512 processes, max 256 per
user, which seems low these days). I believe threaded apps (e.g.:
Java) run into similar issues.
I'd also think I should be able to tweak my configurations with
fetchmail and/or exim such that fewer processes are spawned, or they are
spread out over a longer time (with a lower peak process load).
Wondering who else is seeing similar issues and how they're tackling
them.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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