Spamd processes eating processor and memory

[Jozsef Zsido <zs...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I have a problem with my setup of SpamAssassin version 3.2.3 integrated with
Exim 4.67-5.
The configuration is up and running for almost a year, but only the first
4-5 months were without incident.
I'm running the spamassassin integrated on the system level through the
spamd.

Since a while 2 spamd processes (2 out of 5) started to eat memory reaching
49-49 percent of the total system memory. Then I started to take some steps
and I have disabled the bayes and the auto whitelist features. (I think
that) but the problem didn't disappeared completely but the frequency of
appearing get lower and lower.
I have also paniclog entries from exim: spam acl condition: error reading
from spamd socket: Connection timed out

A week a go, the things get even worse. The spamd processes now are eating
100% processors and the mail system has become quite unstable.

A basic difference between the past, and now is that the processes which
eats memory were run by the root user (is this OK, that they runs with
root?)
The processes eating the processor are run by the debian-exim user.

This is my first attempt to configure spamassassin and there could be a
misconfiguration somewhere.

Have you experience with a similar behavior?
Any idea what could be wrong?

Thanks,
Jozsef