[plug] spamd grinding to a halt

[Cameron Patrick]

Russ Powers wrote:

| > 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...
| 
| Only 64MB of ram, but it is a 564.840 MHz processor!  ;-)
| 
| OK, so, Is there a way to limit spamd to one process? It may make it slow but 
| at least it won't kill the server.

The limit is set by the "-m" command-line option to spamd.  (See "man
spamd" for the gory details.)  In Debian you can set the options in
/etc/default/spamassassin; other distributions will probably put them
somewhere else.

Cameron.