procmail: Timeout, terminating "/usr/bin/bogofilter"

[Daniel Leidert]

Hello,

I went away a few days ago and back today I wanted to fetch all my mails
(ca. 10000 at once). My system consists of: fetchmail -> exim ->
procmail -> (several filters, bogofilter, spamassassin, clamassassin) ->
cyrus

And today I found some weired behaviour. There were more and more
bogofilter processes - the amount increased up to 600-1000 in a really
short time (only 2000-3000 mails were downloaded), _but_ bogofilter
worked (no errors about the environment or similar problems - so
bogofilter definitely processed mails). Then procmail began to terminate
bogofilter process by process showing the error in the subject:

procmail: Timeout, terminating "/usr/bin/bogofilter"

(no bogofilter return/error value message). I've checked my .bogofilter
directory with bogoutil and bogoutil verified, that it is ok. These many
processed "DoSed" my machine. It was almost unusable until everything
finished (it filled my RAM and SWAP - >2GB!).

So what could cause this behaviour? My large database (> 200MB)? Or is
this the intended design (I can remember times, where I had to fetch
several 10000 mails at once and I cannot remember this behaviour)?
Harddrives and Memory seem to be ok. I've checked my installation log
but didn't find anything I had installed/updated, that seem to be
related to this behaviour. Can I configure bogofilter to not start more
than 10 processes? I didn't find anything in the FAQ or the docs.

Regards, Daniel