SpamAssassin Hangup

[Julian Field]

At 11:05 15/07/2002, you wrote:
>I switched to MailScanner from a milter based scanner and it really
>rocks!  LoadAvg has gone down substantially and we are from nasty milter
>problems.

Glad to hear it. Out of personal interest, how big was the change in load?

>Unfortunately, I am having a hard time with SpamAssasin.  For most of
>the mails it's working fine, but it gets hung up for some of the mails.
>I have stopped all DNS based lookups except the MX check from SA.  DNS
>blacklists are off in MailScanner too.  MailScanner has to kill SA after
>the timeout.
>
>The list archive suggests this may be due to DNS lookups, but I think in
>our case this is not true.  Besides, mailscanner takes 100% cpu when SA
>gets stuck with those mails.  I have changed spamassassin timeout to 0
>to see how long it takes.  It consumes 100% cpu until I kill it.  I am
>on Slackware, mail traffic around 30K per day.

Are you using the very latest SpamAssassin (2.31)? Did installing it
upgrade your version of Perl? If it did, then you will need to re-install
SpamAssassin. What version of Perl are you using? (5.6.0 is a bit dodgy).

>Any ideas on what could be wrong?  Is there any easy way to debug this?

I'm afraid I'm not too hot on debugging the internals of SpamAssassin, it's
a very complicated beast.
--
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