[Spambayes] Spambayes flunks stress test

[Coe, Bob]

R. K. Coe

  _____  

I recently bought a new home computer, so the other day I found myself
doing a from-scratch installation of the Spambayes Outlook plugin. I
failed to notice that Background Filtering was turned on by default (or
I had inadvertently turned it on), and I had a couple thousand messages
waiting on my POP3 server. The latter is a VPOP3 proxy server that
downloads messages from my ISP and stores them locally. So as seen by
Outlook, it's a very fast mail server with zero latency. I had
inadvertently set the stage for a major stress test of Spambayes's
background filtering mechanism. It didn't pass the test.

Because Spambayes was set to wait a second or two before starting, the
two thousand (unfiltered) messages came roaring into my inbox as soon as
I hit "Send/Receive". A couple of seconds later Spambayes began
attacking those messages with a vengeance. The system basically froze as
Spambayes took over the CPU and apparently all of the computer's memory.
Every minute or two I'd get a message that the computer was out of
system resources and that I'd have to restart Outlook. It must have been
at least a half hour before Spambayes got done and I was able to regain
control of the computer.

Folks, that computer is a Windows 2003 Server with 2 GB of memory! For
Spambayes to gobble it up like that is unacceptable. I guess I could
have prevented the problem by setting a suitable delay between messages,
but by the time I recognized my error, it was too late. Remember that I
didn't realize that Background Filtering was turned on, so I ignored the
delay setting. I don't normally use Background Filtering, and everything
has been quite normal since I turned it off. So I don't really care. But
some users need the feature, and it seems to me that it's only a matter
of time before some poor wretch repeats my experience. Can't something
be done to limit the percentage of the machine's resources that
Background Filtering is allowed to consume?

Bob <mailto:rcoe at CambridgeMA.GOV>  

MIS Department, City <http://www.cambridgema.gov/>  of Cambridge
831 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139  *  617-349-4217  *  fax
617-349-6165

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