Spam Assasin Timeouts

[Brendan Pirie]

Paul Houselander (SME) wrote:
> Hi List
> 
>  
> 
> I get a few complaints from users that Spam has got through, quite often 
> when I investigate the message I can see in the logs that that 
> SpamAssassin timed out and therefore scored zero.
> 
>  
> 
> Looking at logwatch an average day I would see
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> 
> 20166 messages Scanned by MailScanner
> 
> 170 SpamAssassin timeout(s)
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> 
> Im just after tips as to how to troubleshoot/minimize timeouts, 
> sometimes ive managed to get a copy of the message and ran spamassasin 
> –t –D < message and it works and scores fine, I don’t think its down to 
> load as the load average rarely goes above 3.00 on this server. I also 
> run a caching name server
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>  
> 
> Ive also tried upping the SpamAssasin timeout from 60 to 120?
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>  
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> Any other tips? I was thinking perhaps an option if spamassasin times 
> out the message could be put back in mqueue.in for a further attempt to 
> scan the message?
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>  
> 
> Kind Regards
> 
>  
> 
> Paul
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>  
> 

Paul,

Are you running a caching nameserver?  It's not unlikely that this 
happens when doing RBL lookups if you're not caching DNS.  If RBLs are 
not the issue, then sa-compile may also be worth considering, if you're 
not currently using it.

Brendan