Need to optimise SpamAssassin with MailScanner

Julian Field jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Wed Jan 23 11:17:05 GMT 2002


At 11:05 23/01/2002, you wrote:
>Individually both work well. On enabling SpamAssassin within MailScanner
>I found that to get SpamAssassin to work I had to up the SpamAssassin
>Timeout to 20 (from 10). Without this change the sendmail logs showed
>"SpamAssassin timed out and was killed" every time it was invoked on a
>batch of messages.
>
>Even with a value of 20 (seconds?) there was a time yesterday when that
>was not high enough.
>
>I am running MailScanner/SpamAssassin on our Mail Relay with the
>lightest load. Even with SpamAssassin enabled it normally runs at more
>than 90% idle. Our Mail relays are Sparc Ultra-5_10s (400MHz) with 384MB
>of memory. The behaviour is curious on such a lightly loaded system.
>
>Note that I have disabled RBL+ plus checking by MailScanner and have
>instead enabled it within SpamAssassin (specifying
>rbl-plus.mail-abuse.ja.net and a weight of 10 in the
>/etc/mail/spamassassin.cf file).
>
>Any pointers as to what might be happening would be welcome.

Almost certainly DNS lookup delays. What happens if you move the RBL+
checking back into MailScanner? 20 seconds checking per message is not
really practical...
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ



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