SpamAssassin Prefs File problem

[Ugo Bellavance]

Shahid Hussain wrote:

>>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?

128 MB is probably not enough.  You should upgrade to 256, or, even
better, 512.  Your server is probably swapping terribly, especially if
you didn't disable unneeded services.

Could you please read the section of the MAQ about optimizing your setup
before asking your question?

1- change your %org-name% setting if you don't want to have trouble...
see the comments in MailScanner.conf

2- You Max Children could be optimized.

3- You might want to add (free) BitDefender anti-virus.

4- It probably  uses RBLs in SpamAssassin, and it uses two lists in
MailScanner.

5- http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/#rulespost

>
> Thanks :)

No prob
>
> Shahid

Ugo

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