spamassassin timeouts help

[Ugo Bellavance]

Kosta Lekas wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I would like to figure out how to prevent or minimize spamassassin 
> timeouts. Problem is I’m not exactly sure what causes it to time out in 
> the first place (if someone can explain it to me that would be great). I 
> have 3 MailScanner gateways running on different DMZ’s, MX01, MX02, and 
> MX03.
> 

http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:test_troubleshoot:performance

http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:test_troubleshoot:mailscanner

http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:test_troubleshoot:spamassassin:timeouts

May not help performance, but you should think about upgrading 
SpamAssassin and ClamAV to the latest version.

> 1. MX01 is used primarily for mail archiving relay to IronMountain. I 
> have an internal MS Exchange server, anything sent or received by any of 
> my users is archived to archiveaddress at ironmountain.com 
> <mailto:archiveaddress at ironmountain.com>; It is relayed from Exchange 
> box to MX01 and then to IronMountain’s SMTP servers. MX01 is also a 
> backup MX listed in my public mx pool with a high weight so I do see a 
> lot of spammers trying to hit it. This guy processes an average of 2500 
> messages a day and 1/80 mails get spamassassin timeouts on this relay.    
> 
>  
> 
> 2. MX02 is my outgoing (internet bound relay) as well as my primary 
> incoming mail server listed with the lowest weight in public DNS. This 
> guy processes an average of 1200 messages a day and 1/190 mails get 
> spamassassin timeouts on this relay.
> 
>  
> 
> 3. MX03 is a backup relay for internetbound and incoming and is listed 
> in public DNS with a higher weight that MX02 so I do see a lot of 
> spammers try to hit it. This guy processes only 120 messages a day and 
> 1/10 mails get spamassassin timeouts on this relay.
> 
>  
> 
> What is getting me is the low amount of messages that MX03 is receiving 
> but yet is having so many spamassassin timeouts. Most of the spam that 
> gets thru has come from MX03 and from examination of the headers I can 
> see that spamassassin timed out, but it does catch about 50 a day. Why 
> so many timeouts on this guy. I have included some log entries at the 
> end of this email.
> 
>  
> 
> On All 3 relays:
> 
> Max Spam List Timeouts = 7
> 
> Spam List Timeouts History = 10
> 
> Max SpamAssassin Timeouts = 10
> 
> SpamAssassin Timeouts History = 30
> 
> Max Custom Spam Scanner Timeouts = 10
> 
> MCP Max SpamAssassin Timeouts = 20
> 
>  
> 
> The only thing different on MX03 is that I am using the latest 
> MailScanner with the feature “Cache SpamAssassin Results = yes”    
> 
>  
> 
> Here are the Specs for all three relays as you can see MX02 has the best 
> hardware, MX03 comes in second and then MX01.
> 
>  
> 
> MX01 specs:
> 
> 1 CPU Pentium 3, 1.4GHz, 500MB of ram
> 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 2)
> 
> Perl version 5.008005 (5.8.5)
> 
> MailScanner version 4.42.9
> 
> postfix-2.1.5-4.2.RHEL4
> 
> spamassassin-3.0.4-1_25.el4.at (using DCC)
> 
> clamav-0.87-1.2.el4.rf
> 
>  
> 
> MX02 specs:
> 
> Dual Xeon, 3.2GHz, 4GB of ram
> 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 2)
> 
> Perl version 5.008005 (5.8.5)
> 
> MailScanner version 4.45.4
> 
> postfix-2.1.5-4.2.RHEL4
> 
> spamassassin-3.0.4-1.el4 (using DCC)
> 
> clamav-0.87-1.2.el4.rf
> 
>  
> 
> MX03 specs:
> 
> Dual Xeon, 2.8GHz, 2G of ram
> 
> Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz)
> 
> Perl version 5.008006 (5.8.6)
> 
> MailScanner version 4.51.4
> 
> postfix-2.2.2-2
> 
> spamassassin-3.0.4-2.fc4 (using DCC, using spamassassin cache feature)
> 
> clamav-0.88-1.fc4 (using clamavmodule)
>