[H-GEN] Re: Spam Assassin

[Michael Anthon]

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Jason Parker-Burlingham writes:
> Well, I get mail via pop when I dial up, and maybe once a week or two
> some mailing list or another will have a flurry of activity, and I'll
> receive 100 messages all at once, at which point exim is configured to
> simply queue them for later delivery.  I haven't noticed any unduly
> high load so far, and don't really expect to.

*cough*
I thought exactly this myself the other day, however after last night I have 
changed my mind.  I retrieve my mail from a drop-box on a remote machine 
using fetchmail and then pipe it through exim (to handle directing to the 
corect local users), which delivers locally using procmail which uses SA to 
check the incoming mail. 

Yesterday one of my disks filled up with the end result being that mail 
could not be delivered locally.  When I resolved my space issue and told 
fetchmail to wake up and do it's thing there was about 80 messages and ouch 
did it hurt!!  That was at about 10:00 last night, it was STILL processing 
email at 7:30 this morning before I went to work and I wasn't able to log in 
until about 11:00.  I was running top through all this and this morning the 
load average was 140... hehe.  Oh, the machine is a Celeron 466. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not *all* SA's fault.  I noted that 
exim is also being run from inetd and I'm wondering if that is making it 
fork a new copy of exim for every message as well... further investigation 
required. 

Cheers
Michael 

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