SpamAssassin is constantly timing out

[Matt Kettler]

Chris W. Parker wrote:
> Hello,
>  
> I recently upgraded to the latest (as of two weeks ago) MailScanner and
> now SpamAssassin is consistently timing out.
>  
> I believe the original timeout period was 60 seconds but I've since
> increased it to 300 seconds and it still seems to be consistently timing
> out every five minutes. My old setting was 300 seconds and I didn't have
> this problem.
>  
> The server load is pretty good (I think):
>  
> [root at filter /var/log]# uptime
>  12:19:06 up 112 days,  1:40,  1 user,  load average: 1.47, 1.77, 1.87
> 
> 
> If it's still timing out at five minutes and the server load is not
> high, might it not be a processing power issue?
> 
> Where else should I look?

Julian's debug options are an excellent suggestion.

If you're using ordinary file based (instead of SQL based) bayes, I'd also check
in the bayes directory. If there are several ".expire" file laying around,
MailScanner is killing SA while it attempting to perform expiry on the bayes DB.

If that's the case, a short-term fix would be to run sa-learn --force-expire on
the command line. That will run the expiry process on the command line, and you
should get a bit of a reprieve before expiry tries to run again during normal scans.

Longer term solutions (if this is the problem) can be a mixture of:
	
1) Extend your timeout to be long enough for the bayes DB to expire.
	
2) Disable SA's bayes auto expire feature, and create a cronjob to run sa-learn
--force expire

3) Switch off to SQL based bayes, which runs expire *SIGNIFICANTLY* faster than
DB_File does. (see http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/BayesBenchmarkResults,
where 3 is a force-expire operation)