Spamassassin timeouts - Just an observation

Steve Campbell campbell at cnpapers.com
Tue Dec 23 16:45:16 GMT 2008


BTW - I've been gone a few weeks, and was just reading my email from 
that time. I do not want to imply that NOBODY EVER ANSWERS QUESTION ON 
THIS LIST. My reference to the "Solved" line just meant there has never 
been a definitive resolution for me. The spamassassin timeout problem 
has been fixed for quite a few people it appears. I am guessing that 
sendmail configs, mimeDefang, and a lot of other variables could be 
causing this.

Please don't misunderstand my prior post. I'm all for this mailing list, 
it's great. I just don't want to start another thread like the "NOBODY" one.

steve

Steve Campbell wrote:
> 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
>



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