Whats the max number of rules you can have in /etc/mail/spamassassin?

[Michael Freeman]

We upgraded to the latest version of MailScanner just a few days ago,
4.30.x or whatever the latest version is. MailScanner has bee spawning
processes that run out of control with as many as 7 and 8 processing
sitting out there in TOP. I have been wrestling with defunct and load
issues! Needless to say we are seeing hundreds of messages from
Spamassassin in the logs dealing with timouts and failures.

After looking at this closely i realized what was happening on our server.
Spamassassin starts timing out, Mailscanner tries to compensate and both
MailScanner and Spamassasin start spawning out of control. Why? Very
simple. It seems that Spamassasin cannot handle too many rules
in /etc/mail/spamassasin. My question is, how many rules are too many
rules? I was running the following spamassasin rules from the list of
Rules_Du_Jour

BIGEVIL ANTIDRUG EVILNUMBERS BACKHAIR CHICKENPOX and about 4 others.

And this is what is happening. MailScanner comes around, deliveries the
msg, spamassassin chokes because it cannot handle the number of rules it
has to look though then times out, logs an entry in the log then continues
to timeout. Mailscanner spawns another process because its trying to
deliver another message and the loop goes on and on until your CPU loads
soar out of control.

My question is what is the max number of rules we can place
in /etc/mail/spamassassin?

Im running the same number of rules on all my other server and we are not
having load issues yet on this one server MailScanner + Spamassassin cannot
work properly until i rm -f ALL THE RULES.

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