MCP-Checker (MCP timed out) - Answer: MCP spamassassin timing out

[Julian Field]

On 2 Jun 2006, at 14:22, Quentin Campbell wrote:

> Have identified the cause and found a work around but am worried  
> that a
> simple message could give rise to this problem.
>
> Am getting the MCP checker "timed out" message because the  
> invocation of
> 'spamassassin' that is run for MCP processing is timing out for the
> messages in question. It will do this even if I have an _empty_ 'mcp'
> subdirectory!
>
> I note from MailScanner.conf in 4.51.6-1 that the timeout values  
> for the
> MCP and non-MCP invocations of 'spamassassin' are different. For the
> former it is only 10 seconds while for the latter it is 75 seconds!  
> That
> explains why I only see the probem when the MCP check is done. The
> default values set by Julian are:
>
> SpamAssassin Timeout = 75
> MCP SpamAssassin Timeout = 10
>
> The work around was to change in MailScanner.conf the 'MCP  
> SpamAssassin
> Timeout' value from 10 to 75 (seconds).

The reason the timeout is much smaller is that it is not doing any  
network-based checks, just a very small selection of SpamAssassin  
rules. So it shouldn't take anything like as long as the SpamAssassin  
call for identifying spam.

If it is taking 75 seconds to check a message against about 10 rules  
and nothing else, then there is a problem somewhere.

-- 
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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