spamd causes too much load... can it be run elsewhere?

[jnetsurfer]

Hello everyone,

On one of my servers, spamd sometimes eats up way too much CPU time and causes too much load. Is there any way I can have a separate server handle spamd? Or maybe a separate server for all email traffic?

-Josh

 

[anton_latvia]

Few steps, that could help you:

*** In Setup Spamd Startup Configuration - set maximum children processes to 5.


*** In exim advanced configuration:

ENABLE:
Reject mail at SMTP time if the spam score from spamassassin is greater than 15.0.

DISABLE:
Reject mail with a failure message if the spam score from spamassassin is greater than ***


*** In exim's advanced editor add this to the first input (you may want to play with smtp_accept_max a little bit, if you have problems):

ignore_bounce_errors_after = 45m
auto_thaw = 4h
timeout_frozen_after = 3d
smtp_enforce_sync = true

queue_only_load = 4
deliver_queue_load_max = 10

smtp_load_reserve = 10
smtp_accept_max=100
smtp_accept_max_per_host = 5
smtp_receive_timeout=1m

remote_max_parallel = 5
queue_run_max = 20

Anton.

 

[ncrossland]

We had tried everything to reduce the CPU load - we found (on advice from our server providers) the cause was auto-whitelist files which had grown huge (e.g. each file up to 20 MB was loaded and processed for every mail that arrived). Deleting all the auto-whitelist files, and disabling it in the spamassassin conf has brought things under control again, with no apparent loss in detection accuracy.

(this worked for us, it may or may not be good advice)

 

[jnetsurfer]

Thanks

Thanks for the advice. Anton, I'll let you know if that helps. ncrossland, where are auto-whitelist files located?

 

[ncrossland]

in each user's

/home/username/.spamassassin

 

[u-hosts]

Why don't you use MailScanner + SpamAssassin ?

 

[jnetsurfer]

Why don't you use MailScanner + SpamAssassin ?

I'm considering a VMWare virtual appliance with MailScanner. That way I can send all email to that, and then it can forward email to exim on my cPanel server.