New to SA, problems with production speed

[leonard . gray]

This is my first post here, and liable to be a doozie!

Running SA 3.0.2 with Sendmail 8.12.11, hooked in with spamass-milter 0.2.0, all under Solaris 9.  I also have SPF-Milter installed from spf.pobox.com.  SPF is the first milter, SA is the second
in the sendmail.cf file.

Sendmail running only as MTA with user delivery responsibilities.

I was able to build and install SA and the milter on a test machine (running same config, except Solaris 8).  Test machine was loaded with gcc 3.3.2.

We are starting SA and the spamass-milter program using the following script:

#!/sbin/sh
#
# From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Scott Griffith, ISES-LLC)
# To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <spamassassin-talk@lists.sourceforge.net>
# Subject: Re: [Spamassassin-talk] SysV-style startup script
# Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 12:09:16 -0700
#
# In case there are any Solaris folks out there who aren't comfortable
# with their own rc scripts, here's what I've been using for Solaris 7
# from day 1 with no problems. Filename:
#
# /etc/rc2.d/S78spamd

#PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin
DAEMON=/usr/local/sbin/spamass-milter
SOCKET=/var/run/spamass.sock
DESC="Sendmail milter plugin for SpamAssassin"

case "$1" in
'start')
        if [ -x /usr/bin/spamd -o -x /usr/local/bin/spamd ]
        then
                spamd -d -m 20 -u <obscured> --syslog-socket=inet --nouser-config
        fi

        $DAEMON -p $SOCKET -i 192.168.<obscured> &

        ;;

'stop')
        /usr/bin/pkill -9 -x -u <obscured> '(spamd)'

        /usr/bin/pkill -9 -x -u 0 'spamass-milter'
        rm $SOCKET

        ;;

*)
        echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac
exit 0

I had good success passing occasional messages through SA to test mail accounts and it seems to work just as expected.  On the test machine, I was able to change
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf to match our needs and local configuration.  Our only intent is to let SA tag the X-Spam* headers, providing no change to subject or body of the messages.

The problem I am having now is that under a production load (~30,000 SMTP connections per day), it looks like spamd/spamc handoff is slowing to a crawl and consuming great amounts of memory.  The first 2-3 emails that come in after starting process within 2-5 seconds each, and after about 20 messages, the time spamd takes to process gets up into 100+ seconds.  With a steady volume of mail coming in, everything eventually chokes down, as sendmail itself starts backing up tremendously.

The only thing that I did "out of the ordinary" was that I compiled everything on our test machine, tar'd up the directories that everything was built into, untar'd on the production machine, and ran "make install".  I did it this way because in our situation, compiling on the production sendmail machine is frowned upon.  This very well could be the reason of my slowdown problems, and before I go fight the "but I have to be able to compile in production", I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas about what could be causing the slowdowns.

I know it's a LONNG first post, and thanks to any/all that can muddle through and reply.