Re: spamassassin server load
on Wed, May 14, 2003 at 02:54:37PM +0200, David Fokkema (dfokkema@ileos.nl) wrote:
> Hi group,
>
> The system administrator at my university is somewhat unwilling to
> install spamassassin due to the server load. My thought is that the
> server load will not be too high if one uses spamc/spamd with a
> threshold message size set appropriately. Is this correct?
Single factor most affecting performance is probably setting the maximum
scanned message size. SA's load increases nonlinearly with the size of
the message scanned. Anything > 1K is almost certainly _not_ spam --
spammers need to dump their payload quickly.
Judicious use of whitelists, rule trimming (run whitelist rules, then
spam rules, and set stops at say -5 and +10 (figure anyone who hits
these limits is clean). Alternatively, run SA on one or more other
servers accessed via round-robin DNS as a load-balancing scheme if your
load warrants it.
I've served ~15k users w/ ~40k messages daily on 2-3 year old PIII-300
monoprocessor systems with ~128-256MB RAM and qmail. Peak latencies
of several minutes might occur with qmail concurrencies set to ~7-10,
between 10 am - 2pm local time (mail load was largely within the same
timezone).
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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