spamd not keeping up

["Frank M. Cook" <fc...@acsplus.com>]

I run spamd on a machine of it's own.  the spamc is on a separate windows
computer (actually it's winspamc).  it's version 3 of spamd.  everything was
working fine until a week or so ago and then things started to back up
regularly.  I'd look in the morning and thousands of files were backed up on
my mailserver waiting to be checked by spamd.  to fix it, I'd turn off spam
checking for a few minutes, let the spool clear, and then turn it back on.
things would be fine for a day or so and then the problem would repeat.

I'd had rbl checking turned off on my mailserver feeling spamd should take
care of that, but now I've turned rbl checking back on ahead of spamd to
reduce it's load.  I think the rbl's are catching spam that spamd was
passing but that's another story.  that helped but after a few days the
problem reoccurred.  so I looked at the number of children running on spamd
and increased the m parameter from 5 to 15.  again, that helped for a few
days but yesterday there were 600 or so in the spool.  I looked at the log
on the spamd computer and it seemed to be stopped.  I cleared the windows
spool, restarted the spamd computer, and things returned to normal.

what would cause spamd to just stop?  does it need to be cleared out
periodically with some kind of timer that stops and starts the service at
intervals?  is there some other parameter that needs to be adjusted to keep
the individual processes from filling up?

Frank M. Cook

Re: spamd not keeping up

["Frank M. Cook" <fc...@acsplus.com>]

<What was the last thing that spamd was doing?>
nothing jumped out at me from the log. I don't remember if it stopped mid-message or seemed to be waiting for the next one. I'll try to check the next time it happens.

<And do you run bayes? >
I've never fed it any messages.  pretty sure the checking log says autolearn=no.  however, it's possible I need to actively turn it off. should I set something in local.cf to 0 to avoid some overhead?

<Also, what is the specs on your mail stream and the box running spamd. >
spamd is on a reasonably new computer although not the hottest by far. it's a celeron with 512meg of ram.  there are about 50megs of ram free with 15 children running.  it kept up until a few weeks ago.  the biggest backlog I've seen was 6000 messages.  a few times it was 2,000.  yesterday it was only 600.  when things are running normally there are only 1 or 2 messages queued up.

<Do you limit messages by size (say 300KB)? Winspamc default limit is 256KB, but that can be overridden.>
running defaults.

Frank M. Cook
Association Computer Services, Inc.
http://www.acsplus.com

Re: spamd not keeping up

[JamesDR <ja...@trusswood.net>]

Frank M. Cook wrote:
> I run spamd on a machine of it's own.  the spamc is on a separate windows
> computer (actually it's winspamc).  it's version 3 of spamd.  everything was
> working fine until a week or so ago and then things started to back up
> regularly.  I'd look in the morning and thousands of files were backed up on
> my mailserver waiting to be checked by spamd.  to fix it, I'd turn off spam
> checking for a few minutes, let the spool clear, and then turn it back on.
> things would be fine for a day or so and then the problem would repeat.
> 
> I'd had rbl checking turned off on my mailserver feeling spamd should take
> care of that, but now I've turned rbl checking back on ahead of spamd to
> reduce it's load.  I think the rbl's are catching spam that spamd was
> passing but that's another story.  that helped but after a few days the
> problem reoccurred.  so I looked at the number of children running on spamd
> and increased the m parameter from 5 to 15.  again, that helped for a few
> days but yesterday there were 600 or so in the spool.  I looked at the log
> on the spamd computer and it seemed to be stopped.  I cleared the windows
> spool, restarted the spamd computer, and things returned to normal.
> 
> what would cause spamd to just stop?  does it need to be cleared out
> periodically with some kind of timer that stops and starts the service at
> intervals?  is there some other parameter that needs to be adjusted to keep
> the individual processes from filling up?
> 
> Frank M. Cook
> 
> 
> 
What was the last thing that spamd was doing? And do you run bayes? 
Also, what is the specs on your mail stream and the box running spamd. 
Do you limit messages by size (say 300KB)? Winspamc default limit is 
256KB, but that can be overridden.

-- 
Thanks,
James