spamass-milter stops forking new childs?

[Dave Ellenberger]

Hi everyone!

I'm trying to get spamassassin-milter working on 3 different servers, but on
all 3 it isn't working stable. The problem is always the same an all 3
testing-servers.

1) server1 is some old linux with kernel 2.2 system with a perl 5.005_03,
sendmail 8.12.7 and spamassassin 2.5cvs
2) server2 is kernel 2.4 with perl 5.6.1, sendmail 8.12.6 spamassassin 2.43
3) server3 is kernel 2.4 with perl 5.8.0, sendmail 8.12.7, spamassassin
2.5cvs, dual xeon 2.4b system, 1GB RAM, RAID5

The problem is that when I send many test-mails, mostly with large body
content spamassassin-milter stops forking new childs. Only one process is
left up in the process table when running "ps". I have set up "devnull:
/dev/null" in /etc/mail/aliases for this test. I use F=, to just skip
spamassassin-milter if connection to milter fails. On the same servers
amavis-milter is running great without any crashes/hanging processes like
spamass-milter does :-(

> Jan 28 09:49:09 mail sendmail[27199]: h0S8mvfc027199: Milter
(milter-spam): timeout before data read
> Jan 28 09:49:09 mail sendmail[27199]: h0S8mvfc027199: Milter
(milter-spam): to error state
> Jan 28 09:49:09 mail sendmail[27241]: h0S8mvfc027199: to=/dev/null,
ctladdr=<address@hidden> (2/0),
> delay=00:00:11, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=*file*, pri=30768, dsn=2.0.0,
stat=Sent

Is there some definition that spamass-milter only starts x childs?

At the moment it only preforks 2 processes, maybe it helps when I could
increase it to 10 or something. If this anti-spam solutions is going to live
server it would parse 150'000 mails a day.

Anyone got a Idea what I could improve in my configuration?
Thanks for help!

Dave