Re: Suddenly load average of 15-18???

[Thomas Cameron]

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 08:31 -0700, Loren Wilton wrote: 
> Usually a high load average means that a spamd child suddenly (or possibly
> slowly) got fat, and you are out of memory and thrashing to beat the band.
> The two most common causes of this seem to be Bayes expiry runs and Awl
> expiry runs.  Sometimes though it can seemingly happen from some unknown
> sequence of mail messages.

Is there something I should/could do about these expiry runs?  It seems
odd that it's been like this for a couple of days now...  How could I
know that this was the issue?

> How many children are you running?  What is the max lifetime (messages
> processed) per child?  Limiting to probably 5 children, or maybe even less
> in your case with so few users, and limiting to maybe 20-100 connections per
> child will probably work around your problems.

My rc file has this:

SPAMDOPTIONS="-d -c -m5 --max-conn-per-child=5 -H"

I just added the --max-conn-per-child=5 per Stephen Przepiora's
suggestion but that didn't seem to help.

> Oh, I'm assuming you have at least 512M or so.  If not, you might want to
> cut down to only a couple of children, and definitely go with the lower
> number of connections per child.

Yes, I have 512M.  As I said - this has been working flawlessly since
the server was installed several weeks ago.  It just suddenly went
bonkers a couple of days ago.

Thomas