SpamAssassin 2.55 problem

[Gerry Doris]

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Nejc Skoberne wrote:

> Hi.
>
> > Does anyone have SpamAssassin 2.55 working well?
>
> I have MailScanner 4.21-9 and SpamAssassin 2.55 with latest Postfix.
>
> Before I had a Celeron 533 with 64 MB RAM. My mailserver load is quite
> low (maybe 80-100 messages per day) and it didn't work OK. System was
> using about 100MB of SWAP space! SpamAssassin was timing out, mails
> were stuck in the queue...
>
> I upgraded to 320 MB RAM (I added 256MB) and since then everything
> works just fine.
>
> root at Illusion:~# free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        319904     282456      37448          0      65060      49088
> -/+ buffers/cache:     168308     151596
> Swap:       514072          0     514072
>
> These are the MailScanner processes - they indeed need a lot of
> memory.
>
> postfix  32374  0.0  2.9 10680 9400 ?        S    Jun28   0:00 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
> postfix   1480  0.0  6.7 23036 21532 ?       S    11:02   0:08 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
> postfix   1630  0.0  6.7 23012 21508 ?       S    11:51   0:06 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
> postfix   1642  0.0  6.7 23044 21540 ?       S    11:54   0:06 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
> postfix   1743  0.1  6.7 23000 21496 ?       S    12:19   0:05 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
> postfix   1957  0.2  6.7 23016 21512 ?       S    13:23   0:03 /usr/bin/perl -I/opt/MailScanner/lib /opt/MailScanner/bin/MailScanner /opt/MailScanner/etc/Mail
>
> (There are also other services running on the server
> (sshd, Samba, dhcpd, named, FreeSWAN, ProFTPd), but since
> server is for my personal use, their resource usage is quite low.)
>
> My question: Is this behaviour normal? Does MailScanner (and
> SpamAssassin?) really need so much memory to work smoothly?
>
> Thank you for your answer.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Nejc Skoberne


Since you're only receiving a couple of hundred emails per day you don't
need all those MailScanner processes loaded.  Each of them is consuming
memory and likely only the first one is actually doing anything.

It looks like you're using the default settings so the first instance of
MailScanner is taking the first 100 messages in the queue.  With such a
low volume there will never be enough for any other MailScanner
process...they will just sit in memory.

Do your system a favour and drop the number if MailScanner child processes
to 1 or 2 and then change the number of messages to be handled by each
process to 15-20.  That should lighten the memory load a lot.  You make
these changes in MailScanner.conf.  Don't forget to restart  MailScanner
after making the changes.

I don't think there's any magic answer for the "right" configuration.
For a high volume mail server you probably need to spend the time to tweak
the settings to make sure you're keeping up with the mail.  For low
powered home systems the priority is not using all the system resources
for nothing.


--
Gerry

"The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne"  Chaucer