On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Greg wrote:
> My Exim (version 4.69) sometimes generates "spam acl condition: error
> reading from spamd socket: Connection timed out" messages in the
> mainlog. When I match this error with spamassassin's log I read very
> long scan times (> 120s).
>
> The server is not really heavily loaded.
...
> I could not find any parameter to adjust this timeout and all the
> messages I read about this problem offer to raise the --max-children
> parameter of spamassassin as a solution. I'm pretty sure this is not the
> solution here.
>
> Is this spamd timeout hard coded ? Is there a workaround ?
Unfortunately, perhaps, it appears so, in spam.h:
/* timeout for reading and writing spamd */
#define SPAMD_TIMEOUT 120
I had recently noticed something similar for with the malware scanners
too, in malware.h:
#define MALWARE_TIMEOUT 120
Some flexibility here would indeed be handy.
However, to address your actual problem, if your server is not heavily
loaded, there is probably a good reason for the scan taking so long. If
it happens very often, maybe you are suffering from DNS timeout issues or
suchlike? Sometimes messages can be badly formed in a way that
SpamAssassin doesn't like them (although I do not use the spamd interface
directly from Exim in my environment). If you are doing image processing,
then that can be resource-intensive.
If you increase the timeout so you have exims hanging around for longer
waiting for spamd, you have to consider if your mail server is going to be
able to keep up, or is mail just going to start backing up?
Jethro.
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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
