SpamAssassin Prefs File problem

[Shahid Hussain]

> Shahid Hussain wrote:
> > When I visited to http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/ to test my email
> > system.. then I checked maillog (tail -f /var/log/maillog) - it flooded
with
> > "SpamAssassin timed out and was killed, failure n of 20"
> >
> > what the best way to solve this, scan each email once at time or
something.
> >
> >
> > It just would not complete to scan all the email and it take forever, I
just
> > cleared all the email queue.
>
> Try increasing your Spamassassin time-out (Look for a line like
> "SpamAssassin Timeout = ??" in MailScanner.conf).  Our gateway has a
> Xeon 1.2GHz and 1Gb RAM with a 200Mbps Internet connection and our
> time-out is set to 80 seconds.  We'd rather have the occasional slow
> message than not have it scanned.
>
> What hardware is your MailScanner system running on?  How much mail do
> you process?  Are you using any remote black-lists?  If so, which ones?
>    What sort of Internet do you have?  Are you using Bayes?
>
> There are a number of reasons why Spamassassin will time-out; most
> commonly it is due to RBL's being slow, which in turn may be a problem
> with the speed of your Internet connection.
>
> The other common problem is simply that the hardware you're running
> isn't keeping up with your mail volume.  We've found RAM to be the
> biggest performance killer, or more correctly, the lack of it.  Each of
> our MailScanner children is about 40Mbytes and we run 5 children = 200MB
> + 19MB for the parent.  If your server is running out of RAM and using
> swap, your system will go to it's knees - even if you have VERY fast
> hard drives.  Our system has 76Gb of U320 SCSI in a hardware RAID5 with
> 128MB of cache on the RAID controller (SmartArray 5i for the curious),
> and it was swamped when it was paging; upgraded 512MB -> 1GB RAM and we
> easily churn through 40,000+ messages a day :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
>

Thank you for taking your time for kind explanation, you have really nice
server machine ;)

Our MailScanner system running on:
128MB ram, 6GB Hard-Drive, Intel Pentium III (498.34-MHz 686-class CPU) and
100Mbit connection. And time-out is set to 50 seconds (SpamAssassin Timeout
= 50).

MailScanner will process any emails when its received.  I am not too sure if
it using remote black-lists but I don't have dcc, razor, pyzor plugin
installed (nor /usr/local/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf is NOT
used).  How do I check if it using any remote black-lists?

Bayes is disabled in MainScanner.conf (Rebuild Bayes Every = 0)

I only receive about 10/20 emails every 30-60 minutes and MailScanner is
doing the job well.  But if I receive an email like 10/20 at the same time
then MainScanner will acting crazy when I tested with
http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/

MainScanner also use ClamAV to check the mail viruses.

Can you please take a look at MainScanner.conf -
http://www.zonewave.net/MailScanner.conf  to see how how performance can be
improved? is RBL being used?

Thanks :)

Shahid

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