Using spamd instead of Perl module (was RE: [Mimedefang] Bayes locking)

[David F. Skoll]

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 Matthew.van.Eerde at hbinc.com wrote:

> This lends itself to my "using spamc/spamd from MIMEDefang"
> question.  Adding MySQL support or PostgreSQL support further inflates
> an already large Mail::SpamAssassin object.

Not by that much.  The client library code (pgsql.so in the case of
PostgreSQL) is shared, and compared to the rest of SpamAssassin, it's
tiny.

> When the largest thing in a MIMEDefang slave is the SpamAssassin
> object, the idea of factoring it out comes to my mind.  Instead of ten
> active MIMEDefang slaves, each hoarding their own private SpamAssassin
> object, consider twenty active MIMEDefang slaves - each calling spamc
> to connect to a pool of five running spamd daemons.

This might be a good idea.  I wouldn't fork/exec spamc, but rather implement
the SA client-server protocol directly in Perl (I don't think it's
all that complex.)  Now that spamd has a preforked model, it might work
quite well.

> It would interest me to see some real-world statistics on what
> percentage of the time a given MIMEDefang slave spends in:

I have statistics for CanIt, and I can tell you that over 90% of the average
slave's busy time is spent inside SpamAssassin (or in our case, doing
DB queries.)  This is pretty consistent over hundreds of customers.

Regards,

David.