R. K. Coe
I recently bought a new home computer, so the other day I found myself doing a from-scratch installation of the Spambayes Outlook plugin. I failed to notice that Background Filtering was turned on by default (or I had inadvertently turned it on), and I had a couple thousand messages waiting on my POP3 server. The latter is a VPOP3 proxy server that downloads messages from my ISP and stores them locally. So as seen by Outlook, it's a very fast mail server with zero latency. I had inadvertently set the stage for a major stress test of Spambayes's background filtering mechanism. It didn't pass the test.
Because Spambayes was set to wait a second or two before starting, the two thousand (unfiltered) messages came roaring into my inbox as soon as I hit "Send/Receive". A couple of seconds later Spambayes began attacking those messages with a vengeance. The system basically froze as Spambayes took over the CPU and apparently all of the computer's memory. Every minute or two I'd get a message that the computer was out of system resources and that I'd have to restart Outlook. It must have been at least a half hour before Spambayes got done and I was able to regain control of the computer.
Folks, that computer is a Windows 2003 Server with 2 GB of memory! For Spambayes to gobble it up like that is unacceptable. I guess I could have prevented the problem by setting a suitable delay between messages, but by the time I recognized my error, it was too late. Remember that I didn't realize that Background Filtering was turned on, so I ignored the delay setting. I don't normally use Background Filtering, and everything has been quite normal since I turned it off. So I don't really care. But some users need the feature, and it seems to me that it's only a matter of time before some poor wretch repeats my experience. Can't something be done to limit the percentage of the machine's resources that Background Filtering is allowed to consume?
MIS Department,
City of Cambridge
831 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139
· 617-349-4217 ·
fax 617-349-6165
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