"Myth 4: PERL is designed for language processing, so SpamAssassin is written in a more appropriate language.
Let me preface this with the fact that I've had about 10
years of experience coding PERL. While PERL is very useful
for language processing and web applications, it is also an
extremely slow, interpreted language.
Process startup is slow. Perl is pretty efficient once the process is running, and a well-set-up SpamAssassin 3 configuration will already have the processes started before a spam is even received.
The average overhead
for a single PERL process is around 2MB of RAM.
Yeah, and it is true that SpamAssassin uses lots of RAM (20M per process?) So what, RAM is cheap!
I really don't care about attitudes of author of DSPAM. I just want to know, how much faster SpamAssassin will be, if its Bayesian engine is replaced with something else, for example with DSPAM. It does not hurt, if we try it out and see what happens. And it does not hurt, if people have more alternatives.
I had a little single-processor 1GHz Athlon machine with 256MB RAM using SpamAssassin to scan about 30,000 e-mails per day for a while. That was pushing the RAM usage a little, but it worked fine. I've since upgraded to about 750MB RAM just to be safe, and our load has dropped to about 25,000 mails per day since I started rejecting (550) the high-scoring messages. The DSPAM authors are making it sound like SpamAssassin is more of a performance problem than it really is.
If you want to know, what kind of computer I used, here are its specs: http://iki.fi/juhtolv/eng/tietokone.eng.html
Your biggest problem on this computer is only having 64M RAM and having all kinds of other software (Gnome? Enlightenment? Those will use a lot of your 64M all by themselves!) running when you're trying to load SpamAssassin. Your problem is that you need more RAM, not that there's something wrong with SpamAssassin! Yes, DSPAM will possibly use quite a bit less RAM, so it might be a decent choice for you. But I doubt that it's really as effective as SpamAssassin.
BTW Creating SA-plugin that runs crm114 may be good thing to try out, too. And I don't mind, if some people create bogofilter- and SpamProbe-plugins for SA. Just do it, if you feel so. But DSPAM seems more interesting for me. I haven't been able to try it out, because it is not yet available as Debian-package and I haven't yet bothered to compile it myself. SpamAssassin is packaged in Debian already, but version 3.0 is not yet available as Debian-package.
I reiterate: It does not hurt, if we try out and see what happens.
Having SpamAssassin call some other program like DSPAM will make your performance much worse, because you will already have SA loaded, taking up a chunk of RAM, and then it is trying to load another program, which will use even _more_ RAM.
Your options are:
1) buy more RAM
-or-
2) quit using Gnome, Enlightenment, and SpamAssassin on that box, find a nice thin window manager (IceWM?) and use some low-memory-friendly spam scanner. There are mail clients out there that have Bayes filters built in. Bogofilter may also be an option.
