Mail Backing up while SpamAssassin is in Use

[Richard Frovarp]

Derek Catanzaro wrote:
> ***I posted this thread in the spamassassin mailing list and was 
> advised by another MailScanner user to post here for tuning tips with 
> MS/SA***
>
> I have been having issues with mail backing up on and off over the 
> past week.  I am using MailScanner with SpamAssassin.  This morning 
> for example, I had roughly 500 messages waiting in 
> /var/spool/mqueue.in and that number had increased to about 2200 in 
> less than an hour.  I then tell MailScanner to stop using SpamAssassin 
> to try and identify if the problem is with SpamAssassin or not and now 
> I'm back down to less than 50 messages waiting in the queue in less 
> than a matter of 10 -15 minutes.  So obviously this tells me something 
> is going on with SpamAssassin.
>
> I ran "spamassassin --lint -D" and I did not notice any problems with 
> the output other than a dcc timeout.  Then again, spamassassin has 
> always worked well for me so I may be missing something in the output 
> because I have really never had to troubleshoot this kind of issue 
> with spamassassin.  The recent changes I have made to try and combat 
> the problem is to disable bayes and I turned off the auto expire for 
> the bayes tokens just to make sure that wasn't slowing things down.
>
> I am running a local caching name server so I do not believe this to 
> be a DNS timing issue.  I can provide my spamassassin --lint -D output 
> if anyone is interested.
>
> Fedora Core 1
> SpamAssassin 3.1.0
> MailScanner 4.49.7
> sendmail 8.13.5
>
> Thanks,
> Derek
>
How long is the dcc timeout? 10 seconds? 500 messages times 10 seconds 
is about 83 minutes of extra processing time, since that timeout would 
count for each check. It would seem that you have found your problem.

Richard