[Mimedefang] Off Topic - Mail Message and MySQL

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Wed Jun 18 12:16:01 EDT 2003


On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Phil Eschallier wrote:

> I don't have hard numbers [yet], but we struggle to keep MD + SA running in
> environments processing more than 1 milling e-mail per day.

The culprit is almost surely SA.  Our tests show the DB overhead is
minimal compared to SA scanning.  The general rule for filter-writing
is: Avoid calling SpamAssassin!  If 10% of your mail comes from a big
client or partner, and you can skip SA on mail from there, do it.

For example, in some situations, we avoid calling SA altogether (but
still do a number of DB queries).  Filter times are typically on the
order of 20-50ms (AMD Duron, 900MHz.)  As soon as SA gets involved, we
see filter times in the hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds.

(Of course, if your DB schema is poorly-tuned, it can kill you.  If you
have to do a sequential scan on a table with a million rows, well...)

Hmm.  I should do some tests with and without the DB for real numbers...

--
David.



More information about the MIMEDefang mailing list