Continuing problems under high load

[Matt Cramer]

My architecture is two HPUX 11.00 boxes running sendmail 8.12.6 (compiled
from sendmail.org sources) and spamass-milter-0.1.2 and spamassassin 2.41.
The HPUX boxes run spamass-milters that invoke local spamcs that connect
to spamd on a dual processor, 1G RAM linux box.

I've been unable to identify what is causing spamass-milter to crash on
HPUX under heavy load, so have instituted a work-around of restarting it
whenever it crashes.  Some spam slips through, but most does not.

I am however having a different problem, and googling Usenet indicates
that this *should* have been fixed by me moving to sendmail 8.12.6.  I am
getting occasional error messages:

Oct  9 11:16:53 lennon sendmail[29636]: g99FFSMC029636: Milter: data, 
reject=451 4.7.1 Please try again later

I get one of those every 2-3 minutes on each of my two mail servers.
Obviously I have F= as my failure setting.  I've experimented with the
timeouts by making them very small and also very high, but neither has
seemed to have an effect.

There was another person who posted to comp.mail.sendmail about this
problem vis a vis spamass-milter but he received no replies.

Here is a sanitized snippet of everything logged related to one of the
sendmail processes where this error is generated:

Oct  9 09:58:59 garcia sendmail[14941]: g99Dwpi9014941: from=<address@hidden>, 
size=3864285, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<address@hidden>, bodytype=8BITMIME, 
proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=relay.sender.com [n.n.n.n]
Oct  9 10:01:59 garcia sendmail[14941]: g99Dwpi9014941: Milter: data, 
reject=451 4.7.1 Please try again later
Oct  9 10:01:59 garcia sendmail[14941]: g99Dwpi9014941: to=<address@hidden>, 
delay=00:03:08, pri=30545, stat=Please try again later

This reject message is causing problems with our incoming mail.  The time
for all of these log entries to appear varies, sometimes it takes 3
minutes as above, other times they are all generated within a second.

Any suggestions much appreciated.


Thanks,

Matt

-- 
Matthew S. Cramer <address@hidden>          Office: 717-396-5032
Infrastructure Security Analyst                     Fax:    717-396-5590
Armstrong World Industries, Inc.                    Cell:   717-917-7099