Spamassassin timed out

[Matt Kettler]

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Dhawal Doshy wrote:
> Pascal Maes wrote:
>
>> Helo
>
> ehlo
>
>>
>> Is there a way to have more informations about the reasons of the
>> following failures ?
>>
>> MailScanner[5875]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed, failure 7 of 20
>
> ..
>
>> MailScanner[5875]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed, failure 12
>> of 20
>> --
>> -- Pascal --
>>           --
>
>
> spamassassin -x -D -p /path/to/spam.assassin.prefs.conf --lint
>
> will show you the reason for the timeout.. probably a dns timeout or
> something with your bayes
>

Usually this is just bayes auto-expiry running during a message scan. Look where
your bayes DB is stored, if you have a bunch of "expire" files laying around
this is what's happening.

Suggestions:
1) disable bayes_auto_expire in your /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and set up
a cronjob to run sa-learn --force-expire once a day.

- and/or -

2) Extend your SA timeout in MailScanner.conf to about 10 minutes. I've been
using SA since 2.31 and I've NEVER had it hang up on me. Every time mailscanner
has killed my SA it did so in error. Maybe old versions (2.2, etc) had problems
enforcing RBL timeouts, or on some odd platforms the problem exists, but I've
not seen it.

Early on kills were common because MS had the same timeout as SA RBL checks, so
any time an RBL was down the total SA run time exceeded the MS timeout (oops).
That Julian fixed, a long time ago.

More recently kills have occurred largely because SA has a lot of long-running
database maintenance chores for bayes (and the AWL if you use it). This Julian
has somewhat addressed by increasing the default timeout, but if you've upgraded
from an old version of MS, you probably still have the old short timeout.


Currently I run with 1) and I've extended the timeout to 4 minutes.

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