Hi,
I'm user of spamassassin to reviw a lot (a lot!) of incoming mails with spamassassin lot time ago. Today i have a machine just running spamassassin, due the high CPU and MEM requirements. Just to be clear (may be i have something bad).... The question is:
Q) With spamassassin you need about 20 to 30 seconds per email message and LOTS of RAM and CPU:
a) TRUE
b) FALSE
False. On my home system, which admittedly doesn't see a lot of mail volume, it takes between four and six seconds to scan a message. It sometimes takes longer if some other process is using a lot of memory, because that machine is kind of short on RAM. It's a 500 MHz DEC AlphaPC. I'm not doing DNS caching on that one, so a lot of that time may be waiting for DNS blacklists to respond.
A quick check of the mail server at work, which is faster and uses a caching DNS server, shows most messages are being scanned in under 2 seconds.
If you're seeing 20 to 30 second scan times, your server is probably overloaded. Maybe you don't have enough RAM and you're swapping to disk.
