[H-GEN] Re: Spam Assassin

[Robert Brockway]

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On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Michael Anthon wrote:

> 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

I brought my home mail server to its knees by dropping 100 messages (kind
of accidentally) into the queue simultaneously.  The overheads produced by
the SA script were amazing.  It didn't take too long to recover though
(maybe 30 minutes, can't recall).  This box was a K6-233 with 192Mb ram.

As soon as I had regained control of the box I changed to the spamc/spamd
setup and haven't looked back.  The next weekend I generated 35,000 emails
over a period of the few hours and pumped them through spamc as a test
(sent from a remote box on my lan to my test user :).  It handled the
load without a problem.

I can't think of a single reason to use the perl script in preference to
the spamc binary given that functionality is identical but spamc is
several orders of magnitude more efficient.

> 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.

Interesting.  Sendmail will stop sending mail at a load of 8 & stop
accepting at a load of 12 (by default).  This helped contain the problem
for me.

I'm surprised you lost control of the box for as long as you did.  Even
though my box was thrashing it wasn't long before the problem cleared of
its own account.

> 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.

MTAs can be configured to do that anyway.  I'd avoid running the MTA from
inetd though.  See if exim has delivery modes such as background vs queue
delivery.

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah



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