Recently I licensed my installation of SpamFilter and upgraded from build 302 to 375. Since then, SF gradually eats up memory, to the order of a couple hundred MB per day. I'm running the executable, not the service. I just got back from being away for a few days, and as reported by the Task Manager, SF was using over 700MB of memory. I closed the app and restarted it and it is now using 17MB. Other than having to restart the app every few days, it's been a great program.

Brian,

Can you please verify that under the quarantine tab you click on "Hide List" when you are not needing to use the quarantine grid? Maintaining an open connection to the database with that view consumes a lot of RAM, and should only be used when interactively working with the quarantine.

If it was already hidden, can you please let us know on average what the load on the SpamFilter is, in terms of total emails/day and average number of concurrent incoming connections?

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

I've clicked Hide List and I'll see what happens over the next couple of of days. I get the feeling this may not be the solution, though. My volume is only 100-200 emails a day, and most of my blacklists are set to Do Not Quarantine. Only the keywords and SPF filters go into quarantine. Only 12 emails were in quarantine when the memory usage was off the charts as described previously.

Which brings up a feature request: The ability to not quarantine SPF blocked email. A different setting for Fail vs. Softfail would be nice.

Please explain, though, since this isn't documented anywhere. Normally the Quarantine list *is* hidden (i.e. nothing is shown) until I press Refresh List, so what actually happens when I press Hide List? When I just opened the app, I went to the Quarantine tab, and clicked Hide List. Since nothing was shown, nothing appeared to happen. How do I know what state it is in?

Well after running for a few days after pressing the "Hide List" button, things are better, but I still think there is a problem. Whereas the SpamFilter application was using about 17MB of RAM when started, it is now using 160 MB, as reported by Task Manager.

I just clicked on Refresh List and there are only 15 messages in quarantine. Deleting all of them made no difference in the memory footprint.

Next I will try running as a service for a few days, but as I am running it on a remotely hosted server which I access with Teminal Services, I am unable to view the status without stopping the service and running the app.

Any other ideas?

Brian

Brian,

160MB could be a normal value, depending on the amount of traffic you receive, the size of your blacklist/whitelist files (if any of them are several 100's KB in size or greater), and the size of your corpus database (7-10MB for the db.dat and db.dat.prb are normal, higher size will result in higher RAM). If you can provide some values we can ballpark see if the RAM is normal or not.

If you're accessing a Windows 2000 Server remotely, Terminal Services will not allow you to see the SpamFilter's GUI. You'll have to use a remote access software like PCAnywhere or the DameWare utilities which do show you the real desktop of the server, as is done usually with Win NT4. FYI, Windows 2003 Server does allow Terminal Services to see the real desktop using Remote Desktop.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

> 160MB could be a normal value, depending on the amount of traffic you receive

200-300 emails per day

> the size of your blacklist/whitelist files (if any of them are several 100's KB in size or greater),

Almost all are less than 10 lines, or a few hundred bytes. The only two that are larger are the BlacklistKeywords.txt file which is only 6Kbytes and the WhiteListKeywords.txt file which is 2Kbytes.

> and the size of your corpus database (7-10MB for the db.dat and db.dat.prb are normal, higher size will result in higher RAM).

Mine are only 209K and 295K. That's kilobytes not megabytes!

After leaving the service running alone for 6 days and not touching anything, it was using over 600MB of RAM (which was starting to touch virtual memory and affecting performance). After stopping the service and opening the app, I checked the quarantine and there was only 75 messages. As I said previously, most of my blacklists are set to not quarantine.

So now I've demonstrated that my traffic levels are extremely low, yet the memory footprint of SF after a few days is extremely high. Are you going to continue to say this is normal?

Brian