spamd -m not limiting connections without -d

[Ryan Thompson <sp...@sasknow.com>]

I'm invoking spamd as follows, from daemontools/supervise:

/usr/local/bin/spamd -a -x -m 10 -u mailnull

However, I've now been able to reliably produce a situation where (far)
more than 10 spamd processes are spawned.

I wrote a benchmark application which starts a configurable number of
threads and hammers a mail server as quickly as it will accept mail. So,
having 30 threads each send 12 messages, I observed that the number of
spamd processes on the server varied from just a few (2-3), to a
maximum of 31, taking samples in 20 second intervals over the 241 second
duration of the test. At this level, the server was starting to swap,
which resulted in some extremely poor performance.

System details:

FreeBSD 4.9-p3
SpamAssassin 2.63
sendmail 8.12.9p2
spamass-milter 0.2.0_1
perl 5.8.4 (with ithreads enabled)

$ perl -MSocket -e'print SOMAXCONN'
128

I also tried running spamd with -m 3, and obtained a maximum of 24, mean
of about 20 spamd processes. No change.

I tried running without daemontools (i.e., just run the above command
from a root prompt). No change.

Results were better when supplying the -d option; with -a -x -d -m 3, I
noted a maximum of 6 spamd processes. (Much better than the numbers in
the 20s or 30s seen previously; perhaps the extras were some combination
of zombies, children starting, and the server process (if that isn't
included in the -m count)).

So, empirically, it would seem that -m isn't being honoured when spamd
runs in the foreground (i.e., -d isn't supplied).

How do we track this down?

- Ryan

-- 
  Ryan Thompson <ry...@sasknow.com>

  SaskNow Technologies - http://www.sasknow.com
  901-1st Avenue North - Saskatoon, SK - S7K 1Y4

        Tel: 306-664-3600   Fax: 306-244-7037   Saskatoon
  Toll-Free: 877-727-5669     (877-SASKNOW)     North America

Re: spamd -m not limiting connections without -d

[Ryan Thompson <sp...@sasknow.com>]

Dimitrios wrote to spamassassin-users@incubator.apache.org:

> On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 02:44:16 -0600 (CST) "Ryan Thompson"
> <sp...@sasknow.com> wrote:
>
> > So, empirically, it would seem that -m isn't being honoured when
> > spamd runs in the foreground (i.e., -d isn't supplied).
>
> the problem with -m has already been reported by many other people,
> mainly the problem has been fixed in SA v3.0 which should be out soon.

My apologies for the noise, then. :-/ I'll check more carefully next
time I track down a bug at 2:44am :-)

Cheers,
- Ryan

-- 
  Ryan Thompson <ry...@sasknow.com>

  SaskNow Technologies - http://www.sasknow.com
  901-1st Avenue North - Saskatoon, SK - S7K 1Y4

        Tel: 306-664-3600   Fax: 306-244-7037   Saskatoon
  Toll-Free: 877-727-5669     (877-SASKNOW)     North America

Re: spamd -m not limiting connections without -d

[Dimitrios <se...@altered.com>]

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 02:44:16 -0600 (CST) "Ryan Thompson" <sp...@sasknow.com> wrote:

> So, empirically, it would seem that -m isn't being honoured when spamd
> runs in the foreground (i.e., -d isn't supplied).

the problem with -m has already been reported by many other people,
mainly the problem has been fixed in SA v3.0 which should be out soon.