Jean-Paul Natola wrote: > > 1) Reduce max-children to 8 or less. (Use 6 if you can). > When I go lower, I get "server has reaacehd max children, consider > raising it"
It is normal to receive this message from time to time. It just means that all of your spamd processes are busy. If you have enough memory, you can increase the number of children to get better performance. If you don't have enough memory, increasing the number of children may actually slow things down. SA will slow to a crawl if the machine starts swapping memory. Look at your spamd processes to see how much memory they are each using. Then check your free memory to see how many more you have room for. Getting the right number of spamd children on a low-memory server is a balancing act. Another thing you can do is use the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist on your MTA to reduce the amount of spam coming in to your server. This will reduce the number of spams that SA has to deal with and will also reduce the overall number of connections to your MTA. I've been using this blacklist for quite a while and it seems to be very reliable. I have not had any problems reported with it blocking valid emails. -- Bowie
