Our poor spamassassin machine is not able to keep up with the mail
load. We are constantly getting "prefork: server reached --max-children
setting, consider raising it" errors, and our max-children are already
set at the max that this machine can handle (50).
Since we are using spamc/spamd I figured that it would be trivial to
setup a second spamd on another machine and then the load could be
split. I accomplished this by setting my mailfilter to use '-d spamd'
and configured the spamd host in my DNS to be a round-robin between the
two participating IPs. However, this seems to only work as a
'fail-over', and not a load-balancer, as the spamc man page says:
If host resolves to multiple addresses, then spamc will
fail-over to the other addresses, if the first one cannot be
connected to. It will first try all addresses of one host
before it tries the next one in the list.
In fact, looking at my logs, one of the spamd machines is only
processing requests for one of the three mail servers, the other
requests are going to the other spamd. Likely this is because they all
looked up the address, and then have it cached?
I am using -x, and the man page says that the fail-over behaviour is
incompatible with -x; if that switch is used, fail-over will not occur.
Thats fine, I'm not particularly interested in fail-over, but rather
load-balancing, is there any way to do this without having to setup my
different mail servers to query different spamds?
Thanks for any ideas,
micah
