Headdesk - it appears to be a software problem

[mdlbear]

... so Nova, my fileserver, has been up since about 6:30am this morning. This afternoon I noticed that SpamAssassin's daemon wasn't running, so spam wasn't getting filtered. I started it. A few seconds thereafter, Nova crashed.

I'm guessing either a corrupt application file, corrupt database, or something running out of memory. Possibly some combination. Running out of memory (or some other resource) could be a problem; the others may be fixable by purging and reinstalling spamassassin. Could conceivably be some other weirdness, up to and including a bug in Perl, but the fact that problems have been occurring with increasing frequency is highly suggestive of a problem with spamassassin itself.

15:40 Could also be flaky memory, of course. SA is big, so it could have pushed it over the edge into a bad block. I'll run memtest, though that's no guarantee.

20:11 Spamd is pretty small, and top shows plenty of space: 1G of RAM, about 1/3 full, and 2G of empty swap. I'll watch it for a while.

Comments

[mneme]

Could it be spamassassin running you out of memory?

I had big, big problems on my work desktop for a while that I traced down to my fetchmail runs -- it turned out that whenever a lot of email arrived at once, I got email x spamassassin processes, which would bring my box to its knees. Solution: spamc, plus throttle email.

[mdlbear]

I'm already running spamc + spamd, but spamd spawns up to 5 worker processes, so that is indeed possible. It looks like it died at maybe three. I'll have to check my physical memory size when I get home.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Just have to say that I *love* your furious penguin . . .

[mdlbear]

Stolen from gridlore; it apparently comes from a "poke the penguin" website which I'm too lazy to look for right now.