Spam Assassin stop working after a period of time

Maintenance
1

So after a day or two I will see in the System Check that Spam Assassin is not running.

After a reboot it is fine but while Spam Assassin is not running, no email is processed which poses a problem.

I am running Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS with 1GB of memory on a Digital Ocean droplet.

What would you recommend I look at in order to determine why it is failing?

Please advise.

One additional note - I tried to do an upgrade just in case there was a later release available but it seems my box ran out of memory. Is there any ways to shutdown MailInABox before attempting an upgrade to free up resources?

2

Also - is there any way to be alerted when Spam Assassin stops running or have the service automatically restart if it locks up?

3

Sounds like you need to move to a box with more memory.

Is there any ways to shutdown MailInABox before attempting an upgrade to free up resources?

Mail-in-a-Box isn’t a thing running that can be shut down.

is there any way to be alerted when Spam Assassin stops running

You should get an email from the nightly status checks, but if Spam Assassin isn’t running then email can’t be delivered, so… that’s a problem.

or have the service automatically restart if it locks up?

Better to move to a system with more memory.

4

Any idea why some people can get by with 768 MB, yet this 1GB box is feeling the pressure?

@jxmartinez heavy or bursty email volume?

5

Hey there,

So I do not have high volume on the server at his time.

Maybe 30 emails a day at most for right now across all three domains.

Here’s some more information on my specific setup:

 I am hosting mail for 3 domains
 Each domain has an SSL cert installed
 DNSEC is setup on 2 of the 3 domains

I am not sure if that makes a difference.

6

Just a quick update folks.

Everything has been working fine once I bumped my server up to 2 GB of RAM.

Thank you Josh for the recommendation.

7

An other solutions is to activate 1gb of swap, that’s what I am doing, just in case my 1GB wouldn’t be enough some day.

8

Now I’m wondering if the people doing fine with 1GB just aren’t receiving gigantic attachments.

Or maybe there’s something else that will drive SpamAssassin’s memory usage through the roof? Curious if I’m going to bump into this in the future…

9

It seems a real problem that the email alerting admin that SA has crashed will never be delivered. This effectively means the box can fail silently, with no notification to the admin. Would it be possible to send some (or all) admin notifications to an alternate email account (gmail or whatever)?