For me, this is completely reproducible based on the messages in the mail queue. I've saved the postfix queue files that caused the problems. Once I nuke those from the queue and flush the queue, dspam will work fine until a similar message comes in. If anyone's interested in them for test vectors, let me know. I wrote a script that would flush individual messages and pause between, then check to see if they were still in the queue so I could find out which messages were causing dspam to crash.
My server is not memory-bound and doesn't run that high of a load when the problem occurs. Since this was a production machine, I don't have the luxury of running a debugger on it to find out why dspam was crashing (although I'd like it if dspam had better debug logging for things unrelated to the Bayesian filtering, such as what config parameters it is running under, how it handled the message after it was processed (e.g. connected to localhost:10025 and here is the SMTP transcript). It's impossible to know what it is doing otherwise. I had to run netcat on port 10025 to find out that dspam wasn't connecting to this port (unrelated problem that turned out to be a config error on my part). But I shouldn't have to do that ;-) So, I gave upgrading to dspam 3.8.0 a shot and that seems to handle whatever is thrown at it. I manually created new packages based on some existing work out there. I can't believe debian and ubuntu haven't upgraded to 3.8.0 yet. I haven't seen any known problems with 3.8.0 that would prevent them from upgrading. I've been running it all weekend with no problems -- and that's saying something! FYI, here's a writeup of what I did to upgrade on ubuntu: http://juxtaposition.axley.net/archives/2007/11/postfix_dspam_3_1.html -Jason > Jason Axley wrote: >> Every once in a while, I get some message in my postfix mail queue >> that causes dspam to crash. There isn't any error or indication in >> the debug logfile, which I have enabled. This causes mail messages to >> queue up since postfix can't access the dspam socket. But restarting >> dspam and running postqueue -f to flush the mail queue causes dspam to >> crash again as it hits the same message again. >> >> How can I debug what and where dspam is crashing at? Is this a known >> issue in this version? Does 3.8 offer a fix? > > I've had exactly the same symptoms (on same versions) except that > restarting did not immediately crash again; therefore this is probably > unrelated (especially given your comments in subsequent messages to this > list), but in our case the machine was running low on RAM and increasing > the RAM solved the problem. > > We reached the point of having a script that grepped the output of ps > for the presence of dspam and restarted dspam/postfix/clamav if not > present, then emailed us to tell us it had happened. The script was > triggering once every day or so before the memory upgrade, never since. > > -- > Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 > Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG > > > !DSPAM:4,474aab8232572080552694! > >
