SpamAssassin (spamd) eating a lot of CPU....

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 11:02:34PM -0500, Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> Since a recent update of Spamassassin to:
> 
> PORTVERSION=    3.1.7
> PORTREVISION=   3
> 
> I've noticed that each email that gets scanned causes the process to eat 
> up 80+% of the CPU time, and it's slow...
> 
> I'm not really sure what changed.
> 
> Likewise, when I start it up for the first time, I see:
> 
> [ top output ]
> 49106 root        1 106    0   290M   267M RUN    0   0:17 *98.52%* 
> perl5.8.8
> 
> I have a Dell system here, and it cranks up the fan every time a message 
> comes in now, with the recent spamd.
> 
> Curious if anyone else has had these issues, etc.
> 
> The system is not otherwise active, so I'm certain it's not a resource 
> issue (or constraint thereof).

I've seen this happen before, although with older SpamAssassin
releases (though I have no proof the problem got fixed at all).
At that time, we were using mail/spamass-rules as well.

Since, we've removed using mail/spamass-rules, and haven't seen
this problem.  Possibly there's some SpamAssassin rule which causes
the daemon to spin when certain regexs are matched.  Not sure.
Ours (note the much smaller memory footprint):

root     58179  2.2  5.2 28088 27084  ??  S     3:58am   1:44.79 spamd child (perl5.8.8)
root     65228  0.0  5.0 27172 26128  ??  S     5:58am   0:23.17 spamd child (perl5.8.8)
root       313  0.0  4.3 23812 22176  ??  Ss    2Jan07  11:40.79 /usr/local/bin/spamd -c -d -r /var/run/spamd/spamd.pid (perl5.8.8)

It may be worth truss'ing the perl process and opening a Bug with
the SpamAssassin team.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |