[Mimedefang] MD consuming all memory...

[David F. Skoll]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, 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.

Don't use them; there are real-time DNS blacklist equivalents:

	http://www.surbl.org/

> 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).

My slaves have VSIZE of around 40MB each, and that's with all the
CanIt overhead also.  70MB seems excessive.

> The blacklist files have been static since the server was installed.  Why
> would MD have a problem with these all of a sudden?

Don't know.

> Assuming that the MD slaves cache the entries in the blacklist files, it
> seems as if the slaves would need an additional 6MB each.  Why does this
> make the slaves bottomless pits?

There's little correlation between the size of the blacklist files,
and the in-memory size of the Perl data structures used to hold them.
SpamAssassin does not store its rules in a particularly optimal way.

Regards,

David.