stopping/starting processes based on loadavg

[Mike Jackson]

During the last few days, one of the servers I admin has been having some 
issues receiving massive amounts of mail at once. Since all the mail goes 
through SpamAssassin, it typically has to spawn more children to handle it. 
I've been adjusting its max-children value downward to deal with it, but one 
option I've been considering is having monit kill off spamd temporarily when 
the load average gets too high, then restart it. Here's my current rule for 
spamd:

check process spamd with pidfile /tmp/spamd.pid
   start program = "/etc/rc.d/init.d/spamassassin start"
   stop  program = "/etc/rc.d/init.d/spamassassin stop"
   if loadavg(15min) > 5 for 5 cycles then restart
   if failed unixsocket /var/run/spamd.sock then restart
   alert xxx

If I changed the "if loadavg..." line to the following, would it accomplish 
what I want?

if loadavg(15min) > 5 for 5 cycles then exec "/etc/rc.d/init.d/spamassassin 
stop" else if passed for 5 cycles then exec "/etc/rc.d/init.d/spamassassin 
start"

It doesn't appear from the documentation that I can use the built-in stop 
and start mechanism to resurrect the process when I want it to come back to 
life when the load average goes down; am I reading that correctly? If I use 
exec instead, will the "if failed unixsocket..." rule trigger while spamd 
was stopped based on the loadavg rule?