Spamassassin timeouts - Just an observation

[Steve Campbell]

The topic seems to come up quite often, and although the answers are 
usually pretty much the same, I never really see much of a "Solved" reply.

I upgraded from version 4.58, where I saw maybe 3 or 4 timeouts, to 
4.71, and saw an immediate increase to around 100-300 timeouts. I ran 
all of the --debug and --debug-sa flavors of help I could think of. I 
reviewed the logs. I run a caching nameserver. And I zeroed out some RBL 
scores. I still have yet to find why this happens. I eventually upgraded 
to 4.72, and started using clamd. I still get the large numbers of 
timeouts. I would think that the fact that this doesn't happen with all 
of my large batches indicates I'm not using any dead RBLs.

I'm still exploring the causes, but haven't had much luck. I find it odd 
that SA would really keep RBLs that have expired over time in their 
default files, so I really don't think it's that. I do all of my 
checking of RBLs in SA. I always do my configuration and language 
upgrades, and search for rpmnew and rpmsave files. This has happened on 
3 different but very similar servers that I run.

I'm not really asking for assistance here, but just wanted to let others 
who are seeing this problem to  be aware that there is something unique 
triggering this. I'm fairly confident that it is not happening at all 
sites, but something here is causing it. It may not even be related to 
MS/SA, but totally something else.

The most I could ask for is a small checklist of what to ensure I have 
set. Every time I try to use the debug procedures, the tests perform 
flawlessly with no errors. It is very sporadic. We receive those normal 
bursts of spam, but for the most part, the batches ares small. The 
average amount of email per day is usually around 10k emails, but I get 
the above stated 100-300 timeouts. I'm going to try and match batch 
numbers to timeouts and see if this will reveal anything. I only run 3 
Children on a fairly hefty Dell PowerEdge, but I do use 30 messages per 
child. I don't think this is excessive thought.

Hope everyone has a Happy Holiday.

Steve Campbell