I'm wondering if maybe this should be default on new versions of SA? Set it by default for, say 25. The user can then set it higher or lower as needed, or to "0" for unlimited.
Just a thought?
Arguably its a fault of the MTA for allowing an unlimited number of local deliveries to be launched at once, and the -m option of spamd is at best a workaround. (By itself, it doesn't deal with the memory overhead of having a lot of local delivery processes, such as procmail, hanging around waiting for a free spamd slot, which in itself can be enough to bring down a machine)
Even without spamassassin unlimited concurant launching is going to cause you trouble at *some* incomming connection rate, its just that the extra overhead of spamassassin lowers the concurancy a given machine can handle before going splat :)
I set both of my spamd machines to -m25 (about 40k messages/wk, 80% spam) and that works fine. Both machines are 2.4GHz P4s with 384mb.
Since I use sendmail, which unfortunately doesn't have a proper way to limit local delivery concurancy, I'm now using a combination approach - I use -m 15, and return EX_TEMPFAIL for more than 40 simultaneous local delivery processes.
This two stage approach seems to be more efficient that just returning EX_TEMPFAIL alone at a certain threshold as I was before, and safer than -m on its own.
If concurant deliveries exceed 15, but stay below 40, local delivery processes (procmail) queue up waiting for a free slot and are processed immediately when the slot becomes free, helping to keep efficiency high, but if the incomming connection rate causes more than 40 attempted concurant deliveries, the ones above 40 go back onto the mailq so you can't get hundreds of local delivery processes queued. (At most, 40)
Regards, Simon
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