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If you are seeing mailserver meltdowns due to load imposed by SpamAssassin, here's a checklist of items you should run through.
Heavyweight custom rules
You should also avoid using very large custom rules files. The larger custom rules files available from the SA community can double or triple your memory usage.
In particular, the following CustomRulesets will kill your server:
- blacklist.cf (aka. sa-blacklist.cf)
- blacklist-uri.cf (aka. sa-blacklist-uri.cf)
- bigevil.cf
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Avoid at all costs on a busy server. If you are using these rulesets, consider using \[http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SURBL\] instead. |
Try running without custom rulesets, measure memory usage, and re-add them gradually. By doing this you can determine which rulesets are worth the memory/accuracy trade-off. Note also that old rulesets probably won't catch any spam anymore, so you may be adding load for no good reason.
Spamd
If you have enough load to run into memory problems, and you're not using spamd, MailScanner, Amavisd or another system that keeps the Mail::SpamAssassin modules loaded persistently, then that should be your first priority.
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If you're using spamd, you should be aware that spamc will only pass messages under 250k in size to spamd by default. This is a built-in limit that you can override using the "-s" option on the command-line. Refer to the spamc man page for more details.
Heavyweight custom rules
You should also avoid using very large custom rules files. The larger custom rules files available from the SA community can double or triple your memory usage.
In particular, the following CustomRulesets will kill your server:
- sa-blacklist.cf
- sa-blacklist-uri.cf
- bigevil.cf
| Wiki Markup |
|---|
Avoid at all costs on a busy server. If you are using these rulesets, consider using \[http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SURBL\] instead. |
Try running without custom rulesets, measure memory usage, and re-add them gradually. By doing this you can determine which rulesets are worth the memory/accuracy trade-off.
Network tests
If your scan times are very high (greater than 10 seconds per message) and you have network tests enabled, there's a good chance you're running into latency issues caused by network slowness, as described in NetworkTestsLatency.
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