Re: [AMaViS-user] Random problems with SA timing out.

[Mark M. <Mar...@ij...>]

David,

Your problem is quite puzzling and I don't have a good explanation,
so I'll just try to add some observations to your text.

> I have a new install running amavisd-new-20040701, with SpamAssassin
> 3.0 (it actually started with SA version 2.63 same problem).

If you hadn't said you had similar problems with SA 2.63,
I would say the SA 3.0.0 with its Pyzor and DCC interface
problem is hitting you (for the archive: see 
http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3649),
but this doesn't seem to be the case here.

> Anyhow, I randomly get SA TIMED OUT errors, this happens
> in various modules (Resolver/Base.pm, even in the SA rulesets
> like bigevil.cf)

If some of these places occur significantly more frequently then others,
the rest could be just random noise. The Resolver/Base.pm could
indicate DNS problems. A local caching-only DNS server can be
a great help.

> SA TIMED OUT, backtrace: at /etc/mail/spamassassin/bigevil.cf,
> rule BigEvilList_1614,

As Steve  has commented, junk the bigevil, it is a big memory hog.
With SA 3.0.0 you don't need it anyway, because URI tests
are now a plugin.

> Net/DNS/Resolver/Base.pm line 799

That would be the:
        my $sel = IO::Select->new(@_);
        my @ready = $sel->can_read(0.0);
which is supposed to return instantly (timeout of 0).

Quite strange if it happens more than randomly. Are there any Linux
kernel or networking patches for your system that should be applied?
Try with a local caching DNS server for starters and point /etc/resolve.conf
to it.

> amavisd-new continues to run but it eats up system resources like crazy
> and slows the system to a crawl.  Sometimes it takes an hour for the
> error to occur, but it will eventually.

This is a significant information. It tells that your 700 MHz CPU is not
an issue here.

> Again, I started with SA version 2.63 so I upgraded to 3.0 to see if
> that would fix the problem and got the same error.  I also downloaded
> all SA's module dependancies from CPAN to make sure I had the latest
> versions there.  I'm running Gentoo

Ok. Keeping up to date with Perl modules is a good idea.

What version of Gentoo and Linux kernel?
Perhaps someone recognizes some known problem there.

> Anyone out there have a similar problem?

It doesn't ring a bell.

> That's way more machine than I have.  This is my personal mail server 
> (PIII 700 512MB RAM, ATA66 on the drives), I host e-mail for several 
> friends/family and most of them are checking their e-mail via 
> squirrelmail so they don't have the option of using a spam filter on 
> their end.
> ... but as far as spam goes, I would estimate that I get on the order 
> of 4000/day combined to the various accounts.

Keep the number of child processes down, 2 is about right for such a system.

> I'm starting to wonder if it's possibly perl, I'm using 5.8.5, SA 3.0 
> (although as I said the problem happens in SA 2.63 as well), 
> amavisd-new-20040701 (2.0).  Apparently there is a new version of 
> amavisd-new that i am going to download tonight to see if it solves the 
> problems.

The 2.1.2 solves some functional problems of 2.0, but I don't think
it can help with your problem. But do upgrade to 2.1.2 by all means.

I doubt that Perl version would be a problem, as long as it is above 5.8.1.

You may try running 'amavisd debug-sa', perhaps even limiting it
to one child process, and observe the busy log running on the screen.
If it gets in trouble, you might be able to see in what sections of SA the 
stall occurs. Just in case, check also the timing reports from amavisd,
shown at log level 2, and verify that it is indeed the spam check that
gets in trouble.

  Mark