Odd problem with bayes

[John Rudd]

Two of my four front line mailscanner machines (the ones that are still
running sendmail) dramatically slowed down over hte last few days.  It
was really confusing me and making me wonder what strange thing was
going on.  Especially since they were installed in pairs (1&2, then
3&4), and each pair was as identical as I could make them ... and the
slow machines were 1 and 3.

They weren't taking in extra traffic over the others ... less, in fact.

Eventually I noticed that / was horribly full on them, and I tracked it
down to the /.spamassassin directory.

What I found were tons of bayes_toks.expire[digits] files and
bayes.lock.$HOST.digits files ... many of which were days old.  The
other two machines didn't have this problem (a few of the bayes.lock
files, but not many that were old, and none of the expire files).


What would cause this?  What's the right way to clean it?  What's a good
time to set up a routine to clean it automatically every night?  What's
a good way to prevent it?

(was I wrong that the site-wide bayes problems of old were solved?
though, my production machines are still running an older version still
... MailScanner-4.11-1 , with a newer spamassassin ... should I just
turn off bayes until I upgrade?  I think all we're doing with it right
now is auto-learning)