On another paw I note that most family tools are not left running 24x7. If this is his case then a large portion of his 250 messages may be coming in right after he boots. If he is setup to spawn too many spamds then he could experience a memory crisis.
{^_-} From: "JamesDR" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > He did say what his mail average is: > "This is a small-scale family server receiving only about 250 > emails a day." > You may want to read the entire message next time. > Thanks, > JamesDR > > Loren Wilton wrote: > >>When the high LA hits, available RAM is essentially nil and the swap space > >>is about 85% used as well. When I've seen it hit 12 or so, it seemed that > >>the HDD activity would never stop, and I've manually killed spamassassin > > > > and > > > >>any spamd's. > > > > > > You don't say what your normal mail rate is, nor what rules you are running. > > > > 2.64 didn't have some of the memory problems that were really bad on the > > initial 3.0 release, and are now largely corrected. Generally all that > > would cause the sort of thing you are seeing would be either running too > > many spamd children for the available memory, or using some of the really > > big addon rule sets like BigEvil. > > > > How many spamd children do you have running? You should probably limit to > > 3-5 at most with 512M, at a guess. Are you using BigEvil? If so, get rid > > of it and use the surbl patch instead. > > > > You are clearly getting into swap, and this implies that you have overflowed > > memory. > > > > Loren > > > > >