MailScanner consuming 90% of memory and lots of CPU %

[Mike Crowe]

Hi folks,

(I've RTFM'd, Googled, and tested various options before posting--I'm stumped).

I recently upgraded from Suse 8.2 to Suse 9.1, and now I'm having problems
with MS.  Previously, I was running with the defaults of 5 processes and 5
second scans.  System worked very well.  Additionally, I was using a dual
PostFix setup (postfix.in routing to postfix, two copies running).  My
system is a 1.4G PIII, with 480K of RAM.  I noticied no performance problems
at that time.

I'm using MailWatch into a MySQL database to log activity.  Same as previous
system.

My mail server is a pretty low volume server hosting my family and church
web site.  <1000 email messages per day.  However, I want to completely
filter all mail for both, hence the MS and SA setup.

When I Upgraded to version 9.1 of Suse, my system would slow to a crawl when
MS ran.  I eventually found that by reducing "Max Children" to 1, the system
became manageable.  Still, even at 1 child, I can pull up ksysguard and
watch the memory grow to 260K+ for one process.   If I increase children to
2, the memory of each is that large.  If an email comes in, the CPU usage
will jump to 85%.

Is that normal for MS?  I didn't notice things slowing down under the old
system.  If I run 5 children and email comes in, the mouse will stop moving
and the system slow to a crawl.  VPN downstream of the fileserver will crash.

As an FYI, I am pushing mail through ClamAVmodule and SpamAssassin.  I get
the following stats in my mail log file:
Virus Scanning complete at 15766 bytes per second.
MCP checks completed at 5132 bytes per second.
Spam checks completed at 26 bytes per second.
Spamassassin occasionally times out.  I do have it running through Pyzor,
Razor2, and dccproc.  However, that was the same previously.

I've tried disabling SpamAssassin, but no change in memory (I'm sure it
improves the scan time above :)
I've tried disabling bayes (there is a 5M tokens file in
/var/spool/spamassassin), but moving that file and disabling bayes makes no
difference.
I've tried disabling virus checking, no difference.
Not doing RBL checks, because they were timing out.

I had both Debug and Debug SA set for a while, and I couldn't see anything
in the logs which led me deeper in the problem.

New System:
Suse 9.1 (Kernel 2.6.5), MS 4.31.6-1, SpamAssassin 2.63

Old System
Suse 8.2 (Kernel 2.4.20), MS 4.30.3-2 (don't know on SA--can find out if
really needed).

Can anybody point me in the right direction to figure this out?  The system
is working now, but I think something is wrong under the hood, and I'd like
to understand and fix the problem.

TIA!
Mike

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