On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 06:02:09PM -0500, Mike Carlson wrote: > 128MB of RAM with a 238MB swap partition. It was the defaults from the > FreeBSD install. I never thought it would use it all up. All it does is > handle email. > > --Mike
Are you running SpamAssassin as spamd, and do you have a limit on the number of processes? We have a dedicated Linux box with 600 mHz AMD Athlon processor, 384 M RAM, and 786M swap. With "-m 30" in the spamd run line, the machine easily handles 10k emails a day average, about 60% of them classified by SA as spam. Five-minute load average gets above 5.0 a couple of times a day, but no process that matters ever touches swap. SA is 2.60, default config except for the addition of the backhair/popcorn/weeds patterns. As far as I can tell we're not getting any spamc/spamd timeouts. Previously we'd run spamd on another box, a PII-500 with 128M RAM, 128M swap but no limit on spamd processes. SA maxed out swap resulting in the corruption a lightly-loaded DBMS that happened to be running on the same machine. Darnit. I should have put a process limit. There seems to be a slippery slope once you start swapping. Everything gets slower and backlogged load gets more backlogged. Presto, you've maxed out swap. There needs to be a circuit breaker someplace, and "-m" seems to do pretty nicely. I'm also running a shell script that monitors load average and starts killing off spamd processes whenever one-minute load average gets above 30.0, reporting its action to me. So far the monitor script hasn't tripped even once. My advice is run SA on a box that doesn't do much else, tune the number of spamd processes to handle your expected peak load and then some, and bulk up RAM to handle that number of SA processes without getting into swap. Computers are cheaper than time, RAM is cheaper than it has ever been, and it's a good use of a less-than-state-of- the-art box to let it sit there sorting spam at half throttle. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dan Wilder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Technical Manager SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549 Phone: 206-782-8808 Seattle, WA 98155-0549 ICQ UIN 216717075 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. SourceForge.net hosts over 70,000 Open Source Projects. See the people who have HELPED US provide better services: Click here: http://sourceforge.net/supporters.php _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
