[Mimedefang] Patch: adding custom headers for SpamAssassin

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Fri Sep 22 16:16:13 EDT 2006


Jan-Pieter Cornet wrote:

[...]

> As for an object-oriented MIMEDefang... I'm not convinced that is
> a good idea. OO does add overhead to perl -- certainly, calling
> an object method, compared to accessing a global variable, is a very
> costly operation... but of course you need to see that in the
> big picture, it depends how often you'd call a method.

That's true.  However, our commercial CanIt product lines are all
heavily OO, and the OO execution overhead seems to be dwarfed by
SpamAssassin's execution time.  Where OO can hurt (and does hurt us a
bit) is memory use.  When you start going CPAN-happy and using all
kinds of modules in your code, you can really bloat the program.  And
because of Perl's reference-counted GC scheme, very little data memory
is shareable after a fork -- just accessing data touches the reference
counts, dirties the memory pages, and requires a copy.  That means all
your SpamAssassin rules get copied...

We've been going through our code eliminating the worst memory-offenders.
Some are surprising:  A simple "use File::Find;" adds 1.5MB to perl's
memory usage.

> Then again, when compared to running SpamAssassin, the difference
> is probably not measurable, so maybe I'm overreacting.

The SpamAssassin code scares me...

> Hmm... I just realised that the last time I brought this up,
> somebody suggested putting it on a public cvs or svn, I considered
> that I good idea.. and... never came around to doing that.
> If there's still interest, I can still do so.

Sure.  If/when we get around to designing MIMEDefang v3, we might make it
more of a "bazaar" than "cathedral" project, but we'll see...

Regards,

David.



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