WHY is it taking so long to process each email?
That could be any one of MANY problems.
1) are you running out of ram?
2) are DNSBLs timing out?
3) are you using razor or DCC? Did you correctly set up your firewall to allow them to communicate?
4) are you using any "huge" add-on rulesets like bigevil, sa-blacklist.cf, etc.
And WHY does it start a new spamd process? I thought spamd was a "server" of sorts, and would just process each request from spamc as it came in???
Spamd is a FORKING server, much like apache and sendmail. It forks new processes as needed to handle the inbound request. If all the existing children are busy, a new one is created.
You can use the -m parameter to limit the maximum number of children, but several people have had problems making it work in 2.63, most notably when you don't daemonize spamd with -d it doesn't seem to properly self-limit.
