Upgrading from 3.x to 4.x for better stability
Printed From: LogSat Software
Category: Spam Filter ISP
Forum Name: Spam Filter ISP Support
Forum Description: General support for Spam Filter ISP
URL: https://www.logsat.com/spamfilter/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=6793
Printed Date: 04 November 2025 at 3:42am
Topic: Upgrading from 3.x to 4.x for better stability
Posted By: MBor
Subject: Upgrading from 3.x to 4.x for better stability
Date Posted: 19 January 2010 at 10:10am
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Hello SpamFilterISP Support Forum I have about six month's experience with Spam Filter ISP. We run version 3.5.4.692 and quite often discover that the service stops working. We have moved the server to another hardware and it does not solve the problem.
 Would we get a better and more stable system if we upgraded to version 4.1.2.812 ? (Or what ever version that is the latest stable compilation) What hardware recommendations do you have for this version? I contemplate creating a new server as a Virtual Machine (running in VMware 4.0 environment) Our 3.5 is running on some pretty obsolete hardware but it is stable! It is 2 x Pentium III Xeon, 1.5 GB RAM, 2 x RAID 1 SCSI disks and a 4 x Ethernet D-Link Server Network Interface Card.
Kind Ragards Mads Borik ------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
Replies:
Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 23 January 2010 at 5:44pm
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Mads, I'm very sorry for the delay in replying to the post. We sent you an email directly asking for SpamFilter's logfiles, but just now we received a bounce due to a typo we made in your domain name. Going back to the question, if you can zip and email us your SpamFilter's activity logfile for a day the application crashed, we can try to see if the cause was one of the known issues that have been fixed in later versions. There have been quite a few fixes dealing with unexpected crashes since your version, so yes, we would definitely recommend upgrading to either 4.1.2.812 or the latest pre-release 4.1.2.819 (which is very stable). For the hardware, with your current 2x Xeon SpamFilter should be able to handle in the order of 100,000 - 200,000 emails per day, if the server is dedicated to SpamFilter. We do support VMWare environments, but ask users that they size the host and guest's settings so as to give the guest enough "juice" to support the incoming email traffic. ------------- Roberto Franceschetti http://www.logsat.com" rel="nofollow - LogSat Software http://www.logsat.com/sfi-spam-filter.asp" rel="nofollow - Spam Filter ISP |
Posted By: MBor
Date Posted: 25 January 2010 at 2:11pm
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Thank you I have downloaded the latest available version 4.1.2.8.812 and I'm about to install a new server (Windows 2003 Standard, 32 bit) on some old but usable hardware. By the way: Others might want to know hardware details and therefore I just sums this up. The current SpamFilter ISP version 3.5.4.692 is running on an old Compaq DL380 Generation 1. It is equipped with 2 x 930 MHz Intel Xeon III CPU's and 1,5 GB RAM (133 MHz ECC). The PageFile is only 500-600 megabytes and there is plenty of available memory. The disk system is configured as two RAID 1 sets of 18 GB 10K SCSI disks. The OS is installed on the first RAID, then PageFile, Temp files and LOG files and the Access database are located on the second RAID. This gives good I/O performance and helps the system overcome the load. In task manager I can see that the CPU load fluctuates between 10 and 60 % load. I'm pretty impressed that this software can run on such old and obsolete hardware. The hardware itself is very stable and a complete restart of the server is rather quick (2 minutes). So in fact what makes this hardware obsolete is not the age rather the increased bulkiness of software, especially operating system. Windows Server 2000 would probably perform much better but is of course obsolete in many other ways. I will see if I can locate the activity log file. It must be the directory: C:\Program Files\SpamFilter\logfiles ? Files in here contain lots and lots of logging in this form: 01-20-10 10:14:03:359 -- (7972) Blacklist cache - removed IP 77.30.17.160 from limbo during cleanup
01-20-10 10:14:03:359 -- (7972) Blacklist cache - removed IP 59.105.114.99 from limbo during cleanup 01-20-10 10:14:14:640 -- (3844) Connection from: 93.85.166.202 - Originating country : N/A The logfile of date 01-16-2010 ends abruptly at 10:19. This was a Saturday and my colleague discovered the next day that the server was down (red ears More important: I guess we can test the 45 days trial version in production? We are experiencing increased problems with our version 3.5.x. Many customers complain that they cannot receive e-mail from business partners thye normally communicate with. I do not know if an upgrade to a new generation 4.1.X will help reduce the amount of false positives? Kind regards
Mads Borik ------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
– we should have known long time before – but no customers were complaining Posted By: MBor
Date Posted: 25 January 2010 at 2:12pm
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Hm?
How do I han ovet to you a ZIP file with the logging?
Kind Regards
Mads Borik
------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 25 January 2010 at 5:27pm
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Yes, that is the correct directory. Just zip the file for the day of the crash (possibly including the one for the prior day as well, in case there were other errors occurring before leading to the catastrophic one). You can email it to support @ logsat.com. I will send you via a PM the FTP credential of our website if the file is over 8MB in size (too large for email). ------------- Roberto Franceschetti http://www.logsat.com" rel="nofollow - LogSat Software http://www.logsat.com/sfi-spam-filter.asp" rel="nofollow - Spam Filter ISP |
Posted By: MBor
Date Posted: 03 February 2010 at 10:46am
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I will e-mail you the logfiles in a few minutes as described.
I have an urgent question:
Can we test the SpamFilter ISP (v4.1.2.812) evaluation in a production environment?
We urgently need to get a better anti spam solution that we have with the 3.5.x
The problem at the moment is not so much the periodic break down of the SpamFiler service. We are much more concerned of the increasing problems with false positives. That is why we wish to test the evaluation version in production.
Kind Regards
Mads Borik
Denmark
------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 03 February 2010 at 11:22pm
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Mads, We just replied via email, I'll reproduce the answer here. From your logs the issue seems to be related to problems with earlier versions of SpamFilter when scanning PDF files for spam. This problem is not present in the latest version of SpamFilter, as the PDF scanning in these latest versions has been removed due to its unreliability. While we always recommend upgrading to the latest versions of SpamFilter to ensure the greatest stability, you can also try to disable the PDF functionality in your older v3.x version of SpamFilter by setting, in the SpamFilter.ini file, the following value to zero: ;Specify the max number of pages a PDF document must contain in order to be scanned for spam signatures. The scan will be skipped altogether if there are more than this number of pages SpamPDFMaxPagesToScan=0 Please let us know if this does not solve the issue. In regards to testing v4, absolutely yes. You are free to test it in a prod environment.
------------- Roberto Franceschetti http://www.logsat.com" rel="nofollow - LogSat Software http://www.logsat.com/sfi-spam-filter.asp" rel="nofollow - Spam Filter ISP |
Posted By: MBor
Date Posted: 04 February 2010 at 5:09am
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Hello Roberto Thank you for the excellent support you gave me. I have positive feedback from our customers. E-mail with attached documents no longer gets filtered by "keywords". SpamPDFMaxPagesToScan=0 made the difference Question: Can we test the SpamFilter ISP (v4.1.2.812) evaluation in a production environment? Kind regards
------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
Posted By: MBor
Date Posted: 10 February 2010 at 8:49am
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We still have problems with the SF 3.x Question: Are we allowed to test the SpamFilter ISP (v4.1.2.812) evaluation in a production environment? In other words we would like to install a new server, migrate the mail domains one by one, and monitor the result. Kind regards ------------- Mads Borik Datamatiker |
Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 10 February 2010 at 10:15pm
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Mads, As we mentioned in your other posting, absolutely - you are free to evaluate the software in production. ------------- Roberto Franceschetti http://www.logsat.com" rel="nofollow - LogSat Software http://www.logsat.com/sfi-spam-filter.asp" rel="nofollow - Spam Filter ISP |