I am running SA 2.60 installed from the RPMs on Red Hat 9, on an AMD 2100+ based system with a half-gig of RAM.
This has now happened for the second time. Before when it happened, about two weeks ago, I figured it was just a coincidence. Now, Im positive that its SA-LEARN that is the culprit, either directly or indirectly.
Indirectly, I'd say.
I have noticed that when I try to run sa-learn on a corpus of email that is too large,it will terminate with the message segmentation fault.Now, someone here says thats not an SA problem, but a Perl problem. No matter. It is irregular and ought not to happen running a standardversion of Perl (Im using 5.8.0).
SA-Learn works just fine on a smallcorpus. However, there seems to be a dead zonein theremaybe 200 emails or sowhere SA-Learn hangs,not only itself but the whole system. Im talking TOTAL freeze-up, have to hard-reset, everything.
Even worse, it makes hash out of the filesystems, and it takes several hard resets before I get rid of the kernel panicmessages!
Sorry, but with total freezeups like you describe, it is obvious that you have a HARDWARE problem with your server.
The most likely reason is faulty ram. The more you push the system and make use of all its resources, the more likely it is that intermititant and subtle hardware faults will cause a crash.
We had a mail server once that ran for *2 years* with what later turned out to have faulty ram all along. The symptoms were that ocassionally processes would randomly segfault for no apparent reason, and maybe a couple of times a year it would hard lock the machine altogether.
After the machine was replaced memtest86 discovered intermitantly faulty ram. (It only showed as faulty sometimes when running memtest) Replaced the ram and the machine is now perfectly reliable again. This is just an example of course, I'm not saying ram IS your problem, just that it could be.
Seriously - stop looking for a spamassassin problem and start looking very closely at the hardware of your system. It could also be related to the kernel you're running, as that directly interacts with the hardware.
In the past there have been "issues" with some kernel versions and bugs (errata) in AMD CPU's and AMD chipsets, so I'd check the linux kernel mailing list archives for information regarding problems with AMD's as well. (I stay clear of AMD CPU's on mission critical servers exactly for this reason)
Good luck.
Regards,
Simon
