I've troubleshot a little further and I beleive the problem is related to the blacklist files \etc\mail\spamassassin\sa-blacklist.cf & sa-blacklist-uri.cf. These files are large: 4.5MB and 1.2MB respectively. If I move those files, create new empties & reboot, the server seems to behave normally. Configured with Min slaves 2 and max slaves 10, the multiplexor will spawn 2 slaves. These slaves appear in top for about two minutes during initialization, as they consume about 98% of CPU and slowly count up to an RSS of about 70MB each. Then they stabilize and everything is fine (over 128MB of free memory on the system).
The recommendation over at SpamAssassin is to replace the sa-blacklist rules (and bigevil, if you use it) with the more-efficient, still-updated SURBL rules (see www.surbl.org for more info). They tend to cause, well, SA to use up ridiculous amounts of memory.
SURBL, on the other hand, is just a DNS lookup, and as long as you have a caching DNS server on your network, it's going to be *much* more efficient, especially with memory.
You haven't said what version of SA you're using, but there's a patch/plugin for SA 2.6, and it's built into SA 3.0.
-- Kelson Vibber SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>
_______________________________________________ Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.canit.ca MIMEDefang mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
