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

[David Relson]

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 03:51:42 +0100
Daniel Leidert wrote:

...[snip]...
> The file did exist and it worked before and after this error occurred
> (it occurred 10-12 times or so). During the complete run, the amount
> of bogofilter processes increased up to 450 (max) and again processes
> were terminated by procmail after time-out.
> 
> I'm now going to check my memory and my file-systems again. This is
> weired. Never had this problem before. 450 processes at the same time
> for 800 mails is a bad situation.
> 
> Regards, Daniel

Earlier you asked if bogofilter could limit the number of copies of
itself that are running.  The answer is "No".  

Perhaps there's a way to tell exim to limit the number of procmail
instances.  I presume that there's a procmail instance for each of the
450 bogofilter instances.  That many copies of bogofilter trying to
access the database might well lead to a timeout.  

Is bogofilter opening the database read-only or for reading and
writing?  R/W access requires database locking/unlocking and many
bogofilter instances could be a problem.

Does your procmail recipe use locking when running bogofilter?  A
procmail lock would limit the number of bogofilter processes to _one_,
which should be able to complete its run within the time alotted.  This
might affect the total time for processing your large mail batches, but
that would be better than the current situation.