spamd overloading the server

Hello people!

I am a newbie who's still getting a feel of his Linux Box, and I have already run into a strange problem.

I have a site which gives users high capacity mailboxes. There was a spam problem with the site sometime back, and so i enabled spamassassin. The spam problem was no more, but as my server has something round 200 mails in queue at any given time, spamassassin and it's child processes are eating up too much CPU and memory, and causing failures of several services.
At times the server load goes to as much as >800 for a dual processor server spamd overloading the server

As soon as i shut down spamassassin everything goes back to normal.

Can anyone suggest any way to configure spamassassin so that it works more efficiently and still keeps the spam out ? I visited the spamassassin website and got a link related to the issue,
with the following :

Are you experiencing high system load or possibly swapping? Look at the number of children you have spawned, and compare that to the available memory (by default each child can use 20-30 megs of RAM). Depending on load you might find success in lowering the number of children that are spawned (see -m in the spamd documentation).
Can anyone explain to me what this means? Maybe this is a stupid question, but like I said, I am still groping my way around..not really a pro.

My Server details are as follows :

Operating system Linux (Fedora)
Kernel version 2.4.22-1.2199.nptlsmp
Machine Type i686
Apache version 1.3.33 (Unix)
cPanel Build 10.2.0-RELEASE 82
SpamAssassin version..umm..not sure..how do i check that ?

Please tell me if there is some way to configure spamassassin to get round these issues and/or if there is an alternative software solution for this.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
kane

 

 

 

 

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