spamd running 12 processes, each consuming 20MB

[Catfish]

Heya,
I have 12 spamd processes on my server, each of which is consuming at least 20MB. It's caused by spam_full and spam_light, each with 5 child processes.

Dedicating 25% of my ram to spamd sounds a little excessive...is there anything I can do about this?

 

[calete]

Hi, I see this, could be useful.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/OutOfMemoryProblems

I didn't prove that solution, but on my system, I note a high memory consuption for spamassassin causing my server goes out of memory in about 5 days, having to restart the server. I decide to stop spamassassin and my server goes fine since that.

 

[breun]

Are you sure spamd is taking up 100 MB RAM? How did you determine this? You might want to read this blog post, quite an interesting read.

Depending on how you look at it, ps is not reporting the real memory usage of processes. What it is really doing is showing how much real memory each process would take up if it were the only process running.

The moral of this story is that process memory usage on Linux is a complex matter; you can't just run ps and know what is going on. This is especially true when you deal with programs that create a lot of identical children processes, like Apache. ps might report that each Apache process uses 10 megabytes of memory, when the reality might be that the marginal cost of each Apache process is 1 megabyte of memory.