Bayes expire files?

Anthony Peacock a.peacock at chime.ucl.ac.uk
Fri Jan 23 08:24:48 GMT 2009


Hi,

Max Kipness wrote:
> After looking at what is taking up so much space on our server, I found 
> out that I have 7GB in the .spamassassin directory, most being 
> bayes_toks.expirexxx files. When looking up info on these files I’m 
> unable to determine whether these can be deleted or not. Does the 
> sa-learn --force-expire remove these files from disk or create these 
> files? Can they be deleted without affecting the spam detection rate? 
> This server seems to be tuned really well at the moment.

These are an indication that your Bayes expiry processes are regularly 
failing.  They are left behing when an expiry run does not finish, due 
to timeouts or not being able to get a R/W lock on the Bayes database.

You can safely delete these files.

However, you should probably tune your system so that Bayes expiry runs 
are not failing on a regular basis.

I would disable automatic expiry in the MailScanner.conf config file, 
and then set up a daily expiry run in crontab to run at a relatively 
quiet period for your servers.

In MailScanner.conf...

Rebuild Bayes Every = 0

In one of your spamassassin config files (either 
spam.assasssin.prefs.conf or local.cf)...

bayes_auto_expire          0

Then you can add the following command to your crontab...

sa-learn --force-expire

I run that once a day at 22:00, which for my servers is a fairly quiet time.




-- 
Anthony Peacock
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
Study Health Informatics - Modular Postgraduate Degree
http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/study-health-informatics/


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