Spamc child process limit?

[Bradley Walker <ba...@modemnet.net>]

I'm still working on my server that is having problems with running
spamassassin 3.10 and exim 4.60.  Currently the command I run is spamd -d -c
-m 5 to have it use 5 child processes.  Is there some sort of recommended
ratio to amount of processed email to how many max child processes I should
run?  Currently my server load is less than 0.01 - 0.01 - 0.01 each day.
 
Thoughts?
 
Brad

Re: Spamc child process limit?

[Loren Wilton <lw...@earthlink.net>]

> However after about 2-3 hours mail randomly starts getting returned to the
> sender with 421 BSMTP timeout errors.  It doesn't matter if the sender is
a
> client on my server, or someone using a Yahoo account, about 50-75% of
mail
> that is sent is returned undeliverable with that 421 BSMTP timeout error
> message.  Then on top of that tons of messages start being frozen in the

In general if things work for a while and then start getting timeouts, it
indicates that some SA child is probably doing either a Bayes or Awl
auto-expire (which can take MANY minutes) and the timeout in the driving
program is too short.  As a result, the child doing the auto-expire gets
killed, and the next child up needs to do the auto-expire the first one
wasn't allowed to finish, and it gets killed, and the next child tries to do
the auto-expire and...

Either crank up your timeout to 10 minutes or so (if possible) or turn off
auto-expire and run a cron job every so often to do the expire.

        Loren

RE: Spamc child process limit?

[Bradley Walker <ba...@modemnet.net>]

Actually my server logs don't show "server reached" messages.  Rather I'm
still fighting a nasty battle of getting SpamAssassin to work in conjunction
with Exim.  I've posted numerous times on this issue only to get no
resolution.  The whole problem lies with SpamAssassin it seems.  As soon as
I run the command in question, SpamAssassin begins to work normally.  

However after about 2-3 hours mail randomly starts getting returned to the
sender with 421 BSMTP timeout errors.  It doesn't matter if the sender is a
client on my server, or someone using a Yahoo account, about 50-75% of mail
that is sent is returned undeliverable with that 421 BSMTP timeout error
message.  Then on top of that tons of messages start being frozen in the
Exim queue list.   As soon as I kill any spamd/spamc processes everything
goes right back to normal with 100% delivery success on the part of Exim.

I was wondering if having 5 child processes was too little and causing
SpamAssassin to be overloaded thus causing Exim to time out the messages
because SpamAssassin hadn't yet scanned them.  That’s just a theory, but
Exim has worked flawlessly for 3 months now without SpamAssassin since the
orginial problem developed.  Inside of my WebMin control panel it's showing
that I'm having around 14,000 messages being delivered per hour (I think
that is incorrect as my /var/log/maillog is at 1.6gb and hasn't been flushed
in 6 months) but I'm wondering if increasing the child processes would help?

Also for whatever it's worth, I'm seeing these SpamAssassin related error
messages:

(2) × advertising@<domainremoved>.com F= R=spamcheck_director T=spamcheck:
Child process of spamcheck transport returned 2 from command: /usr/sbin/exim
(preceded by transport filter timeout while writing to pipe)



-----Original Message-----
From: users-return-38922-bawalker=modemnet.net@spamassassin.apache.org
[mailto:users-return-38922-bawalker=modemnet.net@spamassassin.apache.org] On
Behalf Of Mike Jackson
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 3:06 PM
To: bawalker@modemnet.net; users@spamassassin.apache.org
Subject: Re: Spamc child process limit?

> I'm still working on my server that is having problems with running 
> spamassassin 3.10 and exim 4.60.  Currently the command I run is spamd 
> -d -c -m 5 to have it use 5 child processes.  Is there some sort of 
> recommended ratio to amount of processed email to how many max child 
> processes I should run?  Currently my server load is less than 0.01 - 
> 0.01 - 0.01 each day.

It's probably going to depend on your mail volume. You could probably figure
it out based on how long it takes to process an average message to find out
how many messages (theoretically) you'd be processing at any given time. Or,
just look in your logs for how often this occurs:

prefork: server reached --max-clients setting, consider raising it

If you don't see it, then you're probably fine. If you do see it, turn up
your -m option until you don't, or you run out of server resources,
whichever comes first.  :) 

Re: Spamc child process limit?

[Mike Jackson <mj...@barking-dog.net>]

> I'm still working on my server that is having problems with running
> spamassassin 3.10 and exim 4.60.  Currently the command I run is 
> spamd -d -c
> -m 5 to have it use 5 child processes.  Is there some sort of recommended
> ratio to amount of processed email to how many max child processes I 
> should
> run?  Currently my server load is less than 0.01 - 0.01 - 0.01 each day.

It's probably going to depend on your mail volume. You could probably figure 
it out based on how long it takes to process an average message to find out 
how many messages (theoretically) you'd be processing at any given time. Or, 
just look in your logs for how often this occurs:

prefork: server reached --max-clients setting, consider raising it

If you don't see it, then you're probably fine. If you do see it, turn up 
your -m option until you don't, or you run out of server resources, 
whichever comes first.  :)