Man, talk about 'major suckage'... Recently Cryx and I have been noticing increasing periods where our mailserver would more or less crawl to a halt. For several minutes, CPU load would be maxed out at 99.x%, swap-usage up to 50%. SMTP would time out, the webmail interface become unuseably slow. The culprit? SpamAssassin with up to four child processes weighing in with 200 to 500Mb RAM consumption each!

Since it happened so irregularily it was difficult to pinpoint the exact bottleneck within the spam filtering process but today it just got so bad, that clients started calling me on the phone and asking, what was going on - in an ad hoc measure we simply had to shut down spamd - now everything is purring along again - load average 0.00 ;-)

But, of course, none of the mails are now being tagged with X-Spam-Scores anymore (rendering my new avelsieve setup quite pointless).

Well, tomorrow Cryx and I will get together and try to figure something out in peace and quiet - afterall, we're only talking about <100 IMAP accounts on a 3GHz machine with 1Gb RAM - we definitely should be able to remedy the situation! It does pain me, though, to think of all the things I actually could be doing instead of dealing with this modern day plague.