Fwd: Re: Tuning SpamAssassin

[Paul Crittenden]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what fixed my problem but it is working fine 
now. I'll just need to pay attention and see if there is any other tuning 
that needs to be done. I increased the number of children to 35, changed 
the max-conn-per-child to 1, removed the lock for spamassassin and added 
DROPPRIV to my procmail script. One of those 4 fixed my problem or perhaps 
all of them. Now emails go into and out of the queue pretty much like before.
Thanks for all of your help.

At 08:37 AM 11/16/2004 -0600, Paul Crittenden wrote:
I'm running SpamAssassin 3.0.1 on a Compaq Alpha running Tru64-Unix, 
sendmail 8.12.10. are there any guidelines to figuring out how many 
children you need when running spamc/spamd. I know that having to many is 
as bad as having to few. I have tried 10, 25 and 30. Thing seem to be 
going better as I continue to increase the number of children but how do 
I know when I have gone to high and need to decrease the number?
Check your swapfile stats. (use top or tool of your choice) If you're 
digging into the swap to any significant degree, you've gone too far.

Note: many OS's will page out stuff that's not been used in a long time. 
Compare swap usage with your "available" ram that can be used if programs 
need it (free physical ram+buffer ram). There should be more available ram 
than swap used.

Basicaly you can keep running more spamd's as long as you're not running 
out of ram. Once you run out of ram, it starts swapping, and things 
quickly grind to a halt. Leave some extra megs free, at least 40mb if you 
include buffers, that way bumps in memory load won't slow you down.