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

[Matthias Andree]

Daniel Leidert <daniel.leidert.spam at gmx.net> writes:

R> 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
>
Is that heavy-duty server class hardware, with battery-backed RAID10 or
RAID50 or stuff? If not, the usual hard disk thrashing will be enough to
bring the box to a screaching halt, as you experienced.

I'd say avoid running more than a few dozen bogofilter processes at the
same time, the more you run, the more contention you'll experience
particularly if you're using on-the-fly updating (-u).  I've never seen
such things happen on Postfix, because I have tight limits on the number
of local delivery processes.

Last time I checked, several years ago, Exim 3.34, it was not at all
robust towards increasing load.

Be sure to let Exim queue incoming messages rather than trying to
deliver them all the way through at the same rate as fetchmail is
feeding them.

-- 
Matthias Andree