Hello all,
Have set up 5 email servers in various locations across the UK and they all are connected to each other. They all are using Debian Sarge. As I wanted spam detection, I installed spamassassin using the official debian packages and following http://www.clues.ltd.uk/howto/debian-sa-fprot-HOWTO.txt 's section on spamassassin, I set up spamassassin (but not fprot) and continiously found that after a few hours, I suddenly experience very high load averages, and extremely slow server performance for everything else, but if I restart spamassassin, the server works fine again, but it would start getting high load averages again later on and so on. So I disabled spamassassin on all servers, and tried a different method on only one server, and used sa-exim http://marc.merlins.org/linux/exim/sa.html - I just did an apt-get install sa-exim, made the necessary changes to make spamassassin work, and I got the same problem back again. While I realise spamassassin is very load intensive, but we are talking about a Compaq Proliant P3 1GHz server, around 350MB RAM, and maybe only 200-300 emails a hour.
I have an email server using exim and spamassassin myself at home, and I decided to do an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" which upgraded spamassassin, and now I got the same problem msyelf at home, where it was working just fine with spamassassin for the past 1 1/2 years?
Here's a snippet from top when the server is crunching through spamassassin:
top - 13:07:59 up 51 days, 36 min, 2 users, load average: 7.16, 7.38, 6.28 Tasks: 116 total, 1 running, 113 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie Cpu(s): 1.9% us, 1.9% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 96.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
And after disabling spamassassin, I get:
top - 13:37:07 up 51 days, 1:06, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.04, 0.94 Tasks: 96 total, 1 running, 95 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.5% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 98.0% id, 1.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Can I ask if this is normal, or am I doing something wrong somewhere?
Spamassassin is version 3.0.2-1, and the server I'm working on has a kernel version of 2.6.8, debian prepackaged version 2.6.8-2-686 to be exact.
Thanks very much for your help in advance
Regards - Piers
