Re: urgent - system slow after spamassassin

[Bob Nielsen <nielsen@oz.net>]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 12:30:07PM +0530, Sandip P Deshmukh wrote:
> hello all
> 
> after installing spamassassin, my system has become terribly slow! i
> thought that it must be becasue spamd is trying to scan all messages. so
> i modified ~/.spamassassin/user-prefs. here is how it looks:
> 
> whitelist_from debian*
> whitelist_from mutt*
> whitelist_from vim*
> 
> now i realize that this has hardly made any difference. for instance,
> messages from debian-user@lists.debian.org appear to be coming from the
> sender.
> 
> what is more, off and on, a message props up saying
> 
> kmod - runaway modprobe loop assumed and stopped
> 
> what is that?
> 
> when my system was crawling, i tried top and it showed several exim
> processes - some of them defunct!
> 
> how do i restore sanity with spamassassin on? for writing this e-mail, i
> have turned it off
> 

I experienced this also.   The whitelist won't help, since the message
still gets processed by spamassassin.

If you use spamc, which is the daemonized version of spamassassin, it
will run somewhat faster, since it is written in C rather than perl. 
It only helps a little, however, since it still needs to invoke
multiple exim processes.  I ended up also running fetchmail as a daemon
as well, getting messages from my ISP every ten minutes or so to avoid
being overrun by a large number of concurrent messages.