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Understood. Perhaps if you are interested in the future pm me and we can review your current dedicated needs. It's quite possible that we can provide exactly what you need at a better price. Something to consider. I will be posting on these forums if I can find the time to write up this solution. In the mean time we will help anyone, like Linux, free of course, no strings attached.

 GA

Using Plesk 8.1.1 and SM 4.0.2592

 I just begun noticing >1G being acquired and ramping up for spamd.exe and have been monitoring since.  Terminating spamd.exe solved the issue for a while, then ramps back in around 2 days. Was about to consider the other 'fixes' minimum threads etc, but updated to Plesk 8.3.

 Don't know how to quickly locate the SA version numbers but the install msi package date changed from:

 26 March 2007, 13:36:29   to

25 December 2007, 16:15:41

and spamd.exe remains at 200MB for over two days :)  Looking good so far!

Lea

Hi,

I too have been having these issues with spamd, my symptoms is the mail starts to backup in the queues with a status of spam-check, and the queue just backs up and eventually all email is hung, this does eventually clear if your mail server does not receive mail for like 6 hrs :), but in our case we are not so lucky.

Spamd obviously does take up a huge amount of memory up, but by just killing spamd from task manager does not always clear the mail queues. By disabling spam assain in the the SM control panel resolves this and within 2-3 minutes the queues are back to normal. I have noticed that this seems to only start backing up when large emails ie 1-5Mb are received and for some unknown reason one of the large email starts this process happeneing. It is not a contant that when large emails come in it happens, it just seems to be a random thing that happens. On our servers this problem happens 2 x a day and we have setup a kill process and restart the spamd process, but this does not resolve the problem

I started to see if there was anything I could do to try and sort this out and try to identify the problem, We make use of KMParse from Kevin, and it can make use of spamassain as well, what I did was to disable spam assassin in SM and enabled it in Kmparse, and executed spamd from kmparse.

The interesting point to note here is it is using smartermails version of spamasassin located in the SM folders, it uses less memory than when SM starts spamd, and even if the settings to allow emails of up to 4mb is set it does not hiccup and the queue starts to backup. I have been running this like this for the last 2 days and spam assasin sits at around 180Mb usage, it obviously does go up but withing a minute or two its back to normal.

 My question are :

1. if it doesnt hang under kmparse why does it hang under SM control ?
2. Why doesnt SM time out the spam-check after 60 secs and carry on like it would if SA was not running

The problem is obvious.  It is a mail size issue and SM needs to give us a max message size parameter so that emails above that maximum size are not sent to spamassassin. SM5 has this option surely this can be enabled for SM4.3 as well.  like most othe applications that run spamassassin there is a max message size setting which only sends emails under that size to spamasassin, I doubt if a spammer going to send a mail larger than 512kb. so why was this not hard coded a long time back ?

I think those are excelent questions and would suggest that since we have an open 4.3.x beta that a size limit be added as this would be a major help.

LeaUK:

Using Plesk 8.1.1 and SM 4.0.2592

Is there a particular reason that you're running such an old version of SM 4.x?

Mike 

Not to promote other products too much, has anyone tried: http://www.yourwaresolutions.com/software.html FreeRam XP Pro? I have used it on both a SM5 server and an Imail server to help with the issues of spam assassin eating up memory and it seems to do a good job. 

Compatibility mainly.  Although last weekend we upgraded from Plesk 8.1.1 to 8.3 (still SM4.0) and guess what, spamd has hovered around 200K ever since.  In fact it's dropped from 230K to 180K over the last 3 days!

The Plesk update allows increased interaction with SM and supports more parameter passing through to SM. Plesk have also fixed several bugs in terms of  Plesk/SM interaction - password checking being one of them.  However with regards to spamd.exe and the comments above re size limits, I note that in Plesk 8.3 there is the following option:

Server-wide settings

So I wonder if the 'Do not filter if mail size' is actually changing any settings in SM?  If so, we need to track these down so you could also apply.

 Maybe someone from SM would care to comment.

Regards
Lea

I agree with some of this especially the fact that there needs to be more plugins developed for Chrome but I do not see it as a memory hog. I just ran my own test. Five tabs open in FireFox takes up 123,900 K and 5 tabs open in Chrome is only taking up 16,400 K. Sorry but all I’ve seen so far is that Chrome bonus dei giochi del casinò sucks up SIGNIFICANTLY less memory than any other browser. It may be a light weight now since it has no plugins and RSS support is week but it is definitely NOT a memory hog.