Weird Memory Problem

[Will Kruss <wi...@webstrikesolutions.com>]

Hi All,

I'm having an issue with a server that processes a lot of emails.

We run three 64-bit dual opteron machines with 1GB of RAM in each (shortly to be 2GB). However, we start SPAMD with about 15 child processes, each with a max requests per child to 50 requests. This seems to work okay generally, with most SPAMd child processes using just over 120mb of RAM.

However, every now and then we have a SPAMd process which uses over 800mb and brings the box to a halt. Killing the process brings everything back to life and SpamD continues processing mail normally.

The machines are only running SPAMd with no other processes running.

We do have some custom rules from SARE and a couple of others (chickenpox/antidrug/weeds2/bogusviruswarnings).

We do not run DNS and have use_razor2, use_dcc, use_pyzor, use_bayes all disabled.

Any suggestions would be great, as it looks like I'm going to have to downgrade to SPAM2 shortly if I can't work it out.

Thanks,
- Will
Webstrike Solutions
http://www.webstrikesolutions.com
support@webstrikesolutions.com
The only host with the first 12 months free!!

Re: Weird Memory Problem

[Daniel Quinlan <qu...@pathname.com>]

"Will Kruss" <wi...@webstrikesolutions.com> writes:

> We do have some custom rules from SARE and a couple of others =
> (chickenpox/antidrug/weeds2/bogusviruswarnings).

Some of these can require a lot of memory, they have not been through
the SpamAssassin development process.  Also, antidrug is included in
SpamAssassin 3.0.0 already.  Maybe you're running 2.64?

Set --max-conn-per-child to a lower number of messages.  That gets the
huge processes out of the way quicker.

Don't run spamc on really big messages, stick with the 250k default,
maybe go even lower.

Make sure you really need 15 children -- is that optimal for your load.
Seems like a lot for a dual, especially if you're not using any network
tests.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Quinlan
http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/