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Terry,
Two questions...
- Have you made any recent (within the past 7 days or so) changes to your filtering rules... especially the keywords filter? -- AND/OR --
- Has anything happened that might have increased your volume of inbound mail traffic?
From past personal experience, I can tell you that there is a "breaking point" that can be reached with keywords filtering, especially if you're inclined to use a lot of multi-word (four words or longer) phrases in your keywords list. Also, this issue seems to sneak up on you... everything's going fine, and then suddenly (usually on a Monday), BAM! CPU is suddenly pegged at 100%.
A few CPU cycles are required for each keyword scan. Multiply this by each keyword in your list, and then multiply this by the number of messages you are receiving. When you see an increase in either of these factors -- keywords (controllable) or message traffic (usually not controllable) -- a server that was running just fine one day can start pegging-out at 100% CPU utilization the next day. Shutting-down and restarting the server does no good; the CPU will just go right back to 100% within a few minutes, because of the backlog of mail traffic waiting to be delivered to your server.
If this is the case... if you have added keywords (or seen increased mail traffic) lately, get rid of a few keywords, especially the longer phrases, and see if this helps. Also, "Desperado" Dan who posts on this board all of the time has posted some great RegEx ideas in the past. Smart use of RegEx can really make SpamFilter fly, by eliminating the need to have a long keyword list in the first place.
This isn't the only thing that can cause 100% CPU, of course... but it is a "unique" issue with this type of solution, and just something to be aware of. Hope this is helpful.
Jim
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