Spamassassin exceeded time limit, not stopping spam

[Matt Kettler]

James Gray wrote:
> On Mon, 8 May 2006 17:50, bsnottum at hkskole.no wrote:
>> Hallo!
>>
>> I am running mailscanner-4.44.6-2 on fc2 - yes I know it is old and I
>> will set up a new server shortly. Anyway I have a problem with
>> spamassassin that I really need to solve before I build the new server.
>>
>> My problem is that spamassassin does not stop spam! In the mail-header it
>> says: not spam - exceeded time limit. If I restart mailscanner it works
>> for a while - a few minutes, but after this the error starts again.
>>
>> Can anyone tell me what is going wrong here?
> 
> These errors are usually due to either an RBL timing out or a spamassassin 
> plugin (helper) not configured correctly, eg, pyzor, razor2, dcc etc.

The above should NOT be the problem, unless you have configured MailScanner for
an absurdly short timeout.

Note that SA 3.x has RBL timeouts, razor timeouts, etc that default in the
sub-15 second range. Also note that with 3.x, no matter how many RBLs timeout,
you'll never wait more than the total timeout duration.

DCC, Razor, and Pyzor all default to 10 seconds.

RBL's default to 15.

Even if all 4 systems are used and time-out together that's a maximum of 45
seconds.

Your SpamAssassin timeout should be MUCH greater than 45 seconds, because there
is a normal operation that takes MUCH longer.

Nearly every case of "SpamAssassin timed out and was killed" is caused by bayes
expiry. This process can reasonably take as much as 5 minutes to complete,
depending on your bayes DB and hardware. On really slow hardware with large
bayes DBs it can take longer.

Look for ".expire" files in your bayes_path. If you see a bunch of them, this
means MailScanner is terminating SA instances that are attempting to perform
bayes maintenance.

I have *NEVER* seen a legitimate incident of MailScanner terminating SA since I
started using it when SpamAssassin 2.31 was released. Early on MailScanner had
it's timeout set to SA's DNS timeout, ensuring that all DNS timeouts would cause
SA to be killed. (oops). Now SA performs bayes maintenance on occasion while
scanning messages.

Set your SpamAssassin Timeout to 10 minutes, and it should fix itself.

SpamAssassin Timeout = 600