Spamassassin timeouts - Just an observation

[Ugo Bellavance]

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.

What is the machine?

Did you check the optimization section of the MAQ page on the wiki?

When running --debug --debug-sa, don't you find anything that is a bit slow?