sudden peak in load average

[Mark Tinguely]

>  Is it possible that there's a message in your queue that's *being 
>  processed*, so it may have arrived earlier than near that time and 
>  causes the spike?

Bart is correct that the SA processing occurs before sendmail log entry.

Lately, I have had problems with the latest spamass-milter. Occasionally,
something is forking off another spamass-milter and the original one is
in some tight loop eating processor time. I am not sure if it is the newer
spamass-milter or the fact that I also added the dkim-milter into the mix.

FYI:
I sent to the original questioner a crude C program to monitor his current
loadaverage. This monitor will save the output of the command "ps -aux" to
a timestamped temporary file when the current loadaverage exceeds a defined
amount (15.0).

--Mark Tinguely