[afnog] Spamassassin with postfix

[Alan Barrett]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Antonio Godinho wrote:
> It seems the spamassassin consumes most of the CPU, many times it is around 
> 98% as well. This is happening even though I don't have any internal mails 
> being sent out and have very few mails coming in (around 20/min). Is this 
>6normal for spamassassin?

Are your using the spamc/spamd client/server or just plain spamassassin?
spamc/spamd is usually much more efficient than plain spamassassin,
because it parses those huge perl modules and rule sets much less
often.  In my case, spamc/spamd takes about 1 second per message,
as opposed to plain spamassassin's 10 seconds per message.  (Times
are very rough estimates.)  However, spamc/spamd seems to be more
likely to sometimes get confused and take forever to process a message;
sometimes even their built-in watchdog timers don't kill them properly,
so I had to add a wrapper to kill spamc after a few hundred seconds.
(Failure to do that causes postfix to kill procmail after 1000 seconds
-- "command_time_limit" in postfix/main.cf --, which leads to bounced
mail.)

--apb (Alan Barrett)