From: Bowie Bailey <bowie_bai...@buc.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:48:30 -0500
Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 15:01 -0400, Michael Scheidell wrote:
> >
> > Match your MTA processes to the spamd children. Your MTA will send
> > 4xx 'busy now, come back to play later' message. Let the sending
> > MTA queue it back up (or zombies will just go away)
>
> I don't really see that as a socially responsible action. If my
> mailserver was completely loaded to the point of not even being able
> to queue a message, I'd buy pushing back on the sender with a 4xx,
> but the reality is that while I may have maxed out my spamd children,
> I can likely still receive and queue mail locally.
>
> The queueing up of mail to spamd really belongs on the local server,
> and should not become a burden on sending MTAs.
This really depends on where you are running SA in the delivery process.
> I'm kinda gathering that this is not possible within spamassassin
> itself. Probably in fact it is for at least some MTAs but how to
> achieve it becomes MTA specific and OT here.
SA is not capable of any sort of queuing. If you need that, you will
have to make your MTA do it one way or another.
The spamassassin executable doesn't queue - it just starts up a new
process each time it scans a message.
However, spamd queues connections when all of the children are busy
processing messages.
>From the spamd man page:
-m number , --max-children=number
This option specifies the maximum number of children to spawn.
Spamd will spawn that number of children, then sleep in the
background until a child dies, wherein it will go and spawn a new
child.
Incoming connections can still occur if all of the children are
busy, however those connections will be queued waiting for a free
child. The minimum value is 1, the default value is 5.
As long as messages are processed reasonably quickly everything will
be fine. If spamd takes too long to process messages then the MTA
will start timing out (like 2-10 minutes). What happens then is up to
the MTA.
-jeff
