Spamassassin timeouts - Just an observation

[Martin Hepworth]

2009/1/15 Steve Campbell <campbell at cnpapers.com>:
>
>
> Ugo Bellavance wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
> Ugo,
>
> I'm still fighting this thing. I don't really see anything specific when
> running debug. I've have reviewed the MAQ and the only thing I'm not sure
> about is reducing the number of RBLs that spamassassin uses. Whenever I look
> at my ps output for Mailscanner, it is always saying "Checking with
> Spamassassin", so something is amiss. I have an identical machine running
> with all the same settings. It runs pretty well.The only difference is each
> has it's own name server and obviously it's own mail flow.
>
> What is the best way to set all scores to zero for the RBLs? I had
> considered making a copy of 20_dnsbl_tests.cf  just to get a list of all the
> RBLs, and modifying it to just include "score" for all of them and putting
> them in my local.cf or spam.assassin.prefs.conf.file, but is this the proper
> way?
>
> Thanks to  all who have tried to help.
>
> Steve
>

Steve

in a word - yes. If you want to turn most of the RBLs off then give
each one you don't want a zero score in local.cf or
spam.assassin.prefs.conf (which should be linked from mailscanner.cf
in the same directory as local.cf). You'll prob find the actual
initial scores in the 50_scores.cf rather than the 20_dnsbl_tests.cf
file.

-- 
Martin Hepworth
Oxford, UK