choked hold queue

[Simon Jones]

Hi,

I have a problem with a mailscanner box at the moment getting choked up
and stacking mail in the /var/spool/postfix/hold directory.

When I check for MailScanner processes all I get is a bunch of

postfix  15620  0.4  1.4 38712 29564 ?       S    11:10   0:01
MailScanner: checking with SpamAssassin
postfix  15660  0.6  1.4 38724 29572 ?       S    11:10   0:01
MailScanner: checking with SpamAssassin
postfix  15689  0.6  1.4 38740 29580 ?       S    11:10   0:01
MailScanner: checking with SpamAssassin
postfix  15719  0.6  1.4 39188 29844 ?       S    11:10   0:01
MailScanner: checking with SpamAssassin

it seems that SpamAssassin is choking up but I can't figure out why.  I
run 3 separate gateway machines with MailScanner logging to a central
mysql db and MailWatch for a front end GUI.

I've shut down each gateway in turn and only gateway 3 seems to be
having this problem, the other two are fine and processing mail normally
and a ps aux | grep MailScanner shows some checking with spamassassin
and others doing virus scans etc.

I changed spamassassin time out within MailScanner.conf and pretty much
every message timed out on the spamassassin scan, so it killed the
process and sent the message on for delivery - spam or no spam.

I've checked spam.assassin.prefs against one I know is working and the
file is exactly the same, a spamassassin -D -p
/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf --lint which didn't report any
errors, although it did say pyzor and dcc checks were local only but I
don't think this is an issue as spamassassin would just ignore the
checks if they're unavailable right?

Dns is resolving fine, no probs at all with that and I can't see
anything different to the blacklists to that of the working server so I
don't think it's a slow rbl.

Anyone know what could be causing spamassassin / mailscanner to choke
like this?  before I stopped the service and moved the queue to a
temporary dir there was about 500mb of mail in there - I'll filter this
back in later but need to get the darn thing running properly first :)

Thanks!!

Simon J