[Mimedefang] Bayes locking

Michael Faurot mfaurot at atww.org
Wed Oct 6 15:05:45 EDT 2004


In article <D3D5B7BCB2EA6747BD14274E0F947D8F05022F at bastogne.dtjboulder.com> you wrote:
> After upgrading to the latest mimedefang and SA, we now see on a
> regular basis the bayes files being locked. It appears to not affect
> mail delivery, and sometimes it will go away after a while. We have
> pretty decent hardware and not a huge system load with mail so I am
> perplexed...but it is filling up our log file. Any suggestions would be
> appreciated...thank you kindly. 

One thing to try, that's fairly painless, would be to make use of the
SA option bayes_learn_to_journal.  From Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf(3):

       bayes_learn_to_journal   (default: 0)
           If this option is set, whenever SpamAssassin does
           Bayes learning, it will put the information into the
           journal instead of directly into the database.  This
           lowers contention for locking the database to execute
           an update, but will also cause more access to the
           journal and cause a delay before the updates are actu?
           ally committed to the Bayes database.

Along with doing "bayes_learn_to_journal 1" you should also look at
setting these:

	bayes_auto_expire 0
	bayes_journal_max_size 0

After doing this, you'll then need to establish a cron job to manually
sync/expire the Bayes DB files.  Essentially it just needs to do the
following as the MIMEDefang user:

	sa-learn -p /etc/mail/spamassassin/sa-mimedefang.cf --force-expire

I run this once a day at a time when there's likely to be little mail
traffic.



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