Thanks for replying to my email! :) My answers are below... On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 07:50, Kris Deugau wrote: > Jim Conner wrote: > > Im running spamassassin on a 700mHz machine. When there are large > > amounts of email > > What kind of email volume? How many accounts?
Believe it or not I am simply running this for one user....me :) So, just one account. However, the volume can get quite high as I have had the same email account for several years so there is lots of spam involved. What's more is that I am on several mail lists so the volume per day is in the thousands...an average of 2.5 to 3K per day. However, this problem that I am seeing lately is occurring when I am only grabbing around 300 messages. > > How much memory is in this system? This machine has 256 Mb of ram. As I stated before, its only being used for one user. > > I'm right on the borderline of stable continuous processing on a > PII/450/512M handling ~80-85K messages/week, SA called as spamc from > individual .procmailrc files, along with a full AV scan in a milter. > I've also had to add a microapp to deliberately tempfail mail delivery > globally if the system load goes over a configurable level (currently > 3.3). > > > I get some serious resource issues. The following is a > > snippet of my machine state. I have no idea what is causing this > > problem. Let me know what else I can provide to help everyone out in > > understanding what is going on better. > > OK, based on your process list, you've managed to *completely* serialize > SpamAssassin calls from procmail (you have many, MANY idle procmail > processes, with matching sendmail processes, but only ONE spamassassin > process), and you're calling spamassassin instead of using spamd/spamc. > > Deliberately serializing SA calls only helps if you're not seeing > processing delays, and if you can tempfail messages waiting for delivery > rather than letting the procmail and sendmail processes hang around > occupying memory. > > Calling spamassassin instead of spamc is Bad on a high-load mail server, > and you should probably start by replacing all calls to spamassassin > with spamc (after making sure that spamd is running). There is a VERY > significant overhead in starting the Perl interpreter and parsing the > global configuration for each call to spamassassin, where spamd/spamc > only incurs that overhead once when the spamd process starts. > > > A few questions...what is going on with the tmp files in my home root > > directory??? Is that usual? > > I've never seen any such files on any system I've adminned; any way to > trace what's creating them and manipulating them? Yes. According to what I was seeing in some of my truss's the other day, the files were being created by spamassassin which is what really confused me. I even managed to see one of the temp files in one of the ls's I ran. > > > Also, why is it taking so long for > > procmail to finish its steps? > > Calling spamassassin vs spamc is probably part of the problem. > > What's in your /etc/procmailrc, and your ~/.procmailrc, and a "typical" > ~/.procmailrc for other accounts on the system? > Unfortunately, I can't get to the machine right now so let me send a follow-up message with this info in it sometime tonight or tomorrow. > It also looks a little like you might have some unusual configuration; > your mail log looks like you're not calling procmail as a local delivery > agent. I can tell you that you are probably right. For some reason I find setting up spamassassin using spamc/spamd particularly confusing. So, let me tell you about my configuration. I am using this machine as my spam filter. So, I have fetchmail fetching my mail and then I have a forward rule in my .forward file to pipe messages into spamassassin. This is probably where the serialness of the spamassassin processes that you see is coming from. Then I am using popfile to grab my mail...yes, superfluous, but it was in use before I started using spamassassin and just never stopped using it. I've never found a decent piece of documentation (when I was setting spamassassin up) that explained the best way to get mail piped into it from say, fetchmail. I'm not saying there isn't good documentation out there, Im just saying I've never found it. Mail has never been one of my strongest points in systems administration. :) Btw, I am using sendmail on FreeBSD on this machine. > > -kgd -- Jim Conner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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