Actually my server logs don't show "server reached" messages. Rather I'm still fighting a nasty battle of getting SpamAssassin to work in conjunction with Exim. I've posted numerous times on this issue only to get no resolution. The whole problem lies with SpamAssassin it seems. As soon as I run the command in question, SpamAssassin begins to work normally.
However after about 2-3 hours mail randomly starts getting returned to the sender with 421 BSMTP timeout errors. It doesn't matter if the sender is a client on my server, or someone using a Yahoo account, about 50-75% of mail that is sent is returned undeliverable with that 421 BSMTP timeout error message. Then on top of that tons of messages start being frozen in the Exim queue list. As soon as I kill any spamd/spamc processes everything goes right back to normal with 100% delivery success on the part of Exim. I was wondering if having 5 child processes was too little and causing SpamAssassin to be overloaded thus causing Exim to time out the messages because SpamAssassin hadn't yet scanned them. Thats just a theory, but Exim has worked flawlessly for 3 months now without SpamAssassin since the orginial problem developed. Inside of my WebMin control panel it's showing that I'm having around 14,000 messages being delivered per hour (I think that is incorrect as my /var/log/maillog is at 1.6gb and hasn't been flushed in 6 months) but I'm wondering if increasing the child processes would help? Also for whatever it's worth, I'm seeing these SpamAssassin related error messages: (2) × advertising@<domainremoved>.com F= R=spamcheck_director T=spamcheck: Child process of spamcheck transport returned 2 from command: /usr/sbin/exim (preceded by transport filter timeout while writing to pipe) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Jackson Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 3:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; users@spamassassin.apache.org Subject: Re: Spamc child process limit? > I'm still working on my server that is having problems with running > spamassassin 3.10 and exim 4.60. Currently the command I run is spamd > -d -c -m 5 to have it use 5 child processes. Is there some sort of > recommended ratio to amount of processed email to how many max child > processes I should run? Currently my server load is less than 0.01 - > 0.01 - 0.01 each day. It's probably going to depend on your mail volume. You could probably figure it out based on how long it takes to process an average message to find out how many messages (theoretically) you'd be processing at any given time. Or, just look in your logs for how often this occurs: prefork: server reached --max-clients setting, consider raising it If you don't see it, then you're probably fine. If you do see it, turn up your -m option until you don't, or you run out of server resources, whichever comes first. :)
