Spamd Children Not Dying

["Sandy S." <sa...@boreal.org>]

We're running SpamAssassin version 3.1.0 on FreeBSD.  Up till now it's been
running like a top, but over the weekend (after a particularly large run of
spam), it suddenly stopped processing messages.  The logs showed many lines
like:

Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: prefork: write of ping failed to 14750
fd=:
at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm
li
ne 287.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: Use of uninitialized value in
concatenation (
.) or string at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdFork
Scaling.pm line 123.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: prefork: killing failed child 14750 fd=
at /u
sr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm
line 12
3.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: prefork: kill of failed child 14750
failed: N
o such process
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: prefork: killed child 14750 at
/usr/local/lib
/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm line 137.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: syswrite() on closed filehandle GEN120016
at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7/mach/IO/Handle.pm line 451.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: Use of uninitialized value in
concatenation (
.) or string at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdFork
Scaling.pm line 287.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: prefork: write of ping failed to 14772
fd=:
at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm
li
ne 287.
Nov  5 05:03:04 teal spamd[28234]: Use of uninitialized value in
concatenation (
.) or string at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdFork
byte 11347664
.
.
.

Then it ran for a while but always with
prefork: child states: KBKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
 - only one child working.

Finally we got the same error messages as above on that last child and spam
scanning stopped.  After I killed and restarted spamd things returned to
normal, but meanwhile we had a lot of spam complaints!

I'm calling spamd with -m 40 (otherwise we were constantly getting the
"Consider raising your max-clients setting" message.)

I found a bugzilla that appeared to address this -
http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4410

but it was supposed to have been resolved in version 3.1.0.  Any ideas what
may have caused this and how to avoid it in the future?

Thanks!

Sandy