On Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:46:57 -0500 Kris Deugau wrote: > RW wrote: > > As regards the original question I just remembered that something > > like this has come up before. IIRC there's a problem with > > timing-out a spamd child while it's inside a regex, so a single bad > > regex can cause serious problems. It's most likely a rawbody, or > > possibly a body rule. > > How would that affect the master spamd process though? Once it's > locked, new connection attempts just time out. If it's a rogue > regex, I'd expect to see a bunch of spamd children crunching away, > but new connections going through just fine (at least up to > max-children).
spamd adjusts the number of children when it gets a message from one of them reporting that it's idle. If you have all the busy children locked-up, and have N idle children and then exactly N messages that trigger the buggy regex come in at the same time, you lock-up all the children and wont get any new idle events. In your case (--min-spare=1 --max-spare=1) you have N=1 which turns a rare scenario into a common one.
