[volunteers] System was near RAM exhaustion

[Lisa]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 12:13:04PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Lisa Corsetti (svlug at flygirl.com):
> 
> > Any idea WHY spamd does this?  If it's an indemic problem, I
> > would think that it would have been fixed?
> 
> You seem to be forgetting that we've not been able to update.
> 
> # dpkg -l | grep spamassassin
> ii  spamassassin   3.0.2-1        Perl-based spam filter using text analysis
> 
> It's a four-year-old version of SpamAssassin, on an essentially
> unmaintainable system, trying to stay alive in a hostile and evolving
> spam environment.  Running obsolete versions has obvious risks.  
> Also, spamd is inherently large and slow because of the way it's written
> (as a perl script), so systems that use it as a primary mail filtering
> tool are easily overwhelmed.  That is why modern systems don't use spamd
> for the primary heavy lifting, but instead pass mail to spamd only after
> it's passed initial tests using the MTA's own rulesets.
> 
> 
> > Would it be possible / reasonable to say, have a cron job run
> > once a minute and if spamd is taking more than some amount of
> > ram or has been running more than some amount of time to kill
> > it?
> 
> Suggest you review the existing cronjobs in /etc/crontab.

Gotcha... I figured there was NOT a relatively simple answer...
even a short term one.