[Mimedefang] MD consuming all memory...

[Kelson]

Ken Morley wrote:
> I've troubleshot a little further and I beleive the problem is related to
> the blacklist files \etc\mail\spamassassin\sa-blacklist.cf &
> sa-blacklist-uri.cf.  These files are large: 4.5MB and 1.2MB respectively.
> If I move those files, create new empties & reboot, the server seems to
> behave normally.  Configured with Min slaves 2 and max slaves 10, the
> multiplexor will spawn 2 slaves.  These slaves appear in top for about two
> minutes during initialization, as they consume about 98% of CPU and slowly
> count up to an RSS of about 70MB each.  Then they stabilize and everything
> is fine (over 128MB of free memory on the system).

The recommendation over at SpamAssassin is to replace the sa-blacklist 
rules (and bigevil, if you use it) with the more-efficient, 
still-updated SURBL rules (see www.surbl.org for more info).  They tend 
to cause, well, SA to use up ridiculous amounts of memory.

SURBL, on the other hand, is just a DNS lookup, and as long as you have 
a caching DNS server on your network, it's going to be *much* more 
efficient, especially with memory.

You haven't said what version of SA you're using, but there's a 
patch/plugin for SA 2.6, and it's built into SA 3.0.

-- 
Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>