[plug] spamd grinding to a halt

[Cameron Patrick]

Russ Powers wrote:

| I heard my server cpu clattering away in the corner. I tried to login
| and everything was happenning really slowly as you'd expect with the cpu
| running like that. It was so slow I finally just shut it down because I
| couldn't do anything useful with it.
| 
| Checking the logs after I rebooted it seems that spamassassin just keeps
| taking longer and longer to scan emails as they come in. For example:

How many processes is your spamd willing to spawn at once, and how
much RAM do you have?  At a vague rule of thumb, I believe spamd takes
up ~50mb plus ~10--20mb for each message that it's checking.  The
default on Debian is to allow up to 10 spamd children at once, which I
found out is not fun on a machine with 'only' 192mb RAM doing a lot of
other things at the same time...

Cameron.