[nycbug-talk] Box randomly locks up, dmesg full of swapzone warnings?

[Bruno Scap]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 11:38:23PM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> > hey matt - i remember something similar to this happening to me at one point 
> > when i got spam'd with some rather large attachments.  spamassasin ended up 
> > eating up a ton of RAM and caused the system to start paging out to disk.
> >
> > not sure if this is your case, but maybe it'll help trouble shoot your 
> > problem....
> 
> I bet you that's it.  SpamAssassin uses a ton of resources on my BSD 
> boxes.  I always see it at 99% CPU, etc.  Thanks for the heads up!

Ideally you should have spamd procs in RAM (calculate how many you
could fit in by looking with top at their sizes), once they start
swapping they just slow down your server since they never really get
any smaller in size.  To make this work you might have to start
refusing connections (with temp failure) when you reach max # of
spamds, which is also a problem if the load never drops, at which time
you might need another server or more RAM in this one.