spamassassin 100%

[bwragg]

Hi,

I regularly have one or more spamassassin process on my ISPConfig system which run at 100% and I can't seem to see why. For example here is one I found this morning:

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
8717 10076     25   0 72284  42m 2580 R  100  1.1   1:07.72 spamassassin
27710 10076     25   0 72208  42m 2580 R  100  1.1 502:29.76 spamassassin

As you can see one has been runing for 502 minutes. I know for sure I'm not under some type of spam attack, I've checked the maillog and no mail is coming in. The slow down from this is massive, we have a 2 dual core cpus and each process will add 25% load on the cpus, so if I have 3 of these runing top reports the total cpu usage is 75%. If I do a kill -9 on the processes they disappear and all is fine. But within a few hours another one is back there running at 100%.

Any idea what causes this to run like this? Were running Centos 4.6 and have applied the ispconfig mod so that we run clamd.

thanks,

bwragg

[till]

Any idea what causes this to run like this? Were running Centos 4.6 and have applied the ispconfig mod so that we run clamd.

Clamd and spamassassin are two completely different software packages, so if you run clamav as clamd or clamscan has no influence on spamassassin.

If you want to run spamassassin as spamd, install spamd from your linux distribution and the reconfigure the spamassassin procmail recipe in /root/ispconfig/isp/conf/ to use the spamd from your linux distribution.

[bwragg]

Thanks till. I only mentioned the clamd update because I noticed that quite a few threads with this spamassassin problem suggested to upgrade the clamd as well.

From what you said here:

If you want to run spamassassin as spamd, install spamd from your linux distribution and the reconfigure the spamassassin procmail recipe in /root/ispconfig/isp/conf/ to use the spamd from your linux distribution.

It sounds like spamd run more stable? Is there any negatives with configuring and using spamd instead of normal spamassassin binary?

cheers,

bwragg

[till]

It sounds like spamd run more stable?

This is not about stability. Spamd is just faster as it does not has to load the libraries again for every mail to be scanned.

Is there any negatives with configuring and using spamd instead of normal spamassassin binary?

No.

[bwragg]

This is not about stability. Spamd is just faster as it does not has to load the libraries again for every mail to be scanned.

My original question was about stability. Spamassassin processes don't shutdown they build up until they take up 100% of my cpu (if I dont kill them). This is even when there is no mail coming in i.e nothing showing in the mail logs.

Any idea what causes it to run like this? Would setting up the system to run using a spamd process help?

[till]

You should try spamd as I suggested.