Piers
that amount of memory is not alot for use with SA. I find you need at least 512mb, esp when I've got lots of rule additions, a local caching namesever to the uri-rbls etc etc
also you might to throttle back the amount of children spamd is spawning as there is a known issue with spamd generating too many forks. Theres a patch or too floating the bugzilla and this email list that will be incorporated into 3.1 when it appears, but they seem to work fine with 3.0.2
Also have you considered a couple of machines acting as a front end to your actual email boxes, therefore taking the load off your servers?
-- Martin Hepworth Snr Systems Administrator Solid State Logic Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300
Piers Kittel wrote:
Hello all,
Have set up 5 email servers in various locations across the UK and they all are connected to each other. They all are using Debian Sarge. As I wanted spam detection, I installed spamassassin using the official debian packages and following http://www.clues.ltd.uk/howto/debian-sa-fprot-HOWTO.txt 's section on spamassassin, I set up spamassassin (but not fprot) and continiously found that after a few hours, I suddenly experience very high load averages, and extremely slow server performance for everything else, but if I restart spamassassin, the server works fine again, but it would start getting high load averages again later on and so on. So I disabled spamassassin on all servers, and tried a different method on only one server, and used sa-exim http://marc.merlins.org/linux/exim/sa.html - I just did an apt-get install sa-exim, made the necessary changes to make spamassassin work, and I got the same problem back again. While I realise spamassassin is very load intensive, but we are talking about a Compaq Proliant P3 1GHz server, around 350MB RAM, and maybe only 200-300 emails a hour.
I have an email server using exim and spamassassin myself at home, and I decided to do an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" which upgraded spamassassin, and now I got the same problem msyelf at home, where it was working just fine with spamassassin for the past 1 1/2 years?
Here's a snippet from top when the server is crunching through spamassassin:
top - 13:07:59 up 51 days, 36 min, 2 users, load average: 7.16, 7.38, 6.28
Tasks: 116 total, 1 running, 113 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.9% us, 1.9% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 96.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
And after disabling spamassassin, I get:
top - 13:37:07 up 51 days, 1:06, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.04, 0.94
Tasks: 96 total, 1 running, 95 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.5% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 98.0% id, 1.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Can I ask if this is normal, or am I doing something wrong somewhere?
Spamassassin is version 3.0.2-1, and the server I'm working on has a kernel version of 2.6.8, debian prepackaged version 2.6.8-2-686 to be exact.
Thanks very much for your help in advance
Regards - Piers
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