First, thanks to everyone for your responses.

> Agreed. If nothing else, I still want to know what "wedged" means. :-)

Wedged...

Well 4 of my 5 spamds are running on old Sun Ultra 5s running FreeBSD
Sparc64.  I had them lying around so they cost me nothing to deploy.
Unfortunately they only have 128Mbytes of ram.  This is plenty for one
child spamd per machine.  At normal load levels this is not a problem,
since I have 5 machines.  The 5th machine is an Intel box with enough
ram and I allow spamd to spawn 8 children.

At some point before the failure someone's bayes databases appears to
have become corrupt.  The next invocation of spamd for this person would
grow to an enormous size, consuming the available ram, then go into swap
hell as it continued to want more and more ram.  Eventually the process
would be terminated.  This caused a significant bottle-necking of spam
processing.

> It's hard to help when posters don't respond to requests for
> clarification.

My bad.  I got interrupted and had to work on other things.  I am now
getting caught up on my mail.

> It'd be unreasonable to expect everyone to always post all and only
> the important details right off the bat, but they should at least
> stick around for replies

I've been properly chastised now.

 - Mike

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