spamd vs. builtin SA (was Re: [Mimedefang] Patch: adding custom headers for SpamAssassin)

[John Scully]

We made the same change long ago - we normally have over 100 mimedefang 
threads running, but average 15 spamd.  This is due to so much spam being 
stopped by DCC, no user checks, black lists etc, all fired off from 
mimedefang.  I had many people on this list tell me I was dead wrong, that 
there was no benefit to using spamd...but we sure see one.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jan-Pieter Cornet" <johnpc at xs4all.nl>
To: <mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: spamd vs. builtin SA (was Re: [Mimedefang] Patch: adding custom 
headers for SpamAssassin)


>
> On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 10:00:01AM -0500, David F. Skoll wrote:
>> > But, given the fact that we just switched to using spamd instead of
>> > the builtin Mail::SpamAssassin modules, we don't really need support
>> > builtin to mimedefang at the moment either...
>>
>> Just curious: Why the switch?  Do you see better performance?
>
> Yes, but mainly due to better memory utilisation, and because of
> our specific setup.
>
> We don't scan everything with SpamAssassin, about 25% of the mails
> are scanned with SA, the rest are only virus-checked, or checked
> against the remote SMTP server.
>
> Loading SpamAssassin in memory requires about 25MByte, and with
> 50 mimedefang slaves, that adds up. Some of our servers were
> swapping occasionally, especially when some large map-building
> processes were being run, eating another 500MB of RAM.
>
> We are now using about 5 busy spamd slaves, with very occasional
> peaks to 15.
>
> Of course, if every email is run through spamassassin, there probably
> isn't a lot to gain.
>
> -- 
> Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc at xs4all.nl>
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