Periodic (5min) SpamAssassin timeouts

[Martin Hepworth]

Tony Johansson wrote:
> We're having problems with periodic SpamAssassin timeouts.
> We have 3 Centos 4.2 servers, running MailScanner 4.54.6 and SpamAssassin 3.1.5
> 
> The timeouts seem to hit servers individually, with numerous timeouts all 
> coming in 5 minute (roughly) intervalls.
> 
> No 5 minute cronjobs exists, timeouts seem to occur and stop for no apparent 
> reason. Loads, network connectivity etc are the same for all 3 servers, yet 
> timeouts aren't evenly distributed among the servers when they occur - always 
> 1 or rarely 2 servers get hit.
> 
> dcc and pyzor are disabled in spam.assassin.prefs.conf
> SpamAssassin Timeout = 180 in MailScanner.conf
> 
> I've set ut a swatch-job that execs spamassassin --lint -D, iostat, top -b -n 
> 1, vmstat, netstat -p whenever the timeouts occur. So far I havent been able 
> to spot something that sticks out.
> 
> Heres a cut from tonights log:
> Oct 10 03:12:29 mx3 MailScanner[31635]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 6174), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:17:30 mx3 MailScanner[31959]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 8844), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:22:33 mx3 MailScanner[32069]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 11596), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:30:11 mx3 MailScanner[32069]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 15825), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:35:15 mx3 MailScanner[32421]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 18582), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:40:16 mx3 MailScanner[31679]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 21353), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:45:20 mx3 MailScanner[32171]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 24035), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:50:23 mx3 MailScanner[31959]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 26559), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 03:55:23 mx3 MailScanner[31885]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 28997), failure 0 of 20
> Oct 10 04:00:29 mx3 MailScanner[31215]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 31610), failure 1 of 20
> Oct 10 04:05:31 mx3 MailScanner[30786]: SpamAssassin timed out and was killed 
> (pid 1662), failure 1 of 20
> 
> No timeouts after 04:05. (pid info added to aid debugging)
> 
> Any ideas on whats going on here? 
> 
> Any tips on how to further debug this?
> 
> Regards, Tony
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
Tony

I'd check

1) DNS (are you running a local caching nameserver on the servers?)
2) more likely bayes issues. How are you cleaning the bayes system? Are 
you letting mailScanner do it (via the 
spam.assassin.prefs.conf/mailScanner.conf) settings, or are you doing 
this manually via a cron job?

-- 
Martin Hepworth
Senior Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

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