SpamAssassin 2.50 problems

[Julian Field]

I have just managed to work around the nasty problem with SpamAssassin 2.50
repeatedly timing out.

The symptom was that SpamAssassin 2.50 would suddenly time out 20 times in
a row for no apparent reason, at which point SpamAssassin was disabled
until the next scheduled restart ("Restart Every" in MailScanner.conf). I
have fixed this, and it was caused by the style of file locking used by the
SpamAssassin code that cannot clear up after itself if the process is
killed. MailScanner uses flock()-style locking which cleans up after itself
automatically.

There is still a problem, that will have to be addressed by the
SpamAssassin developers, that the Bayes database files are locked for a
long time during each test. Only 1 MailScanner child process can access the
files at a time, resulting in a situation where all the other MailScanner
child processes are waiting for the files to be unlocked. ! change that
should help is to reduce the time between locking attempts. Currently it
waits for 0.5 - 1.5 seconds between attempts. Shortening that to 0.1 - 0.2
seconds should improve things. But unfortunately the timing numbers are
hard-wired into the SpamAssassin code. If you are interested, it is in line
59 of /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1/site_perl/Mail/SpamAssassin/UnixLocker.pm.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
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