James Lavery wrote:
Hi Daryl,
Aha - yes I think you've right. The Slug only has (I think) 32MB of memory,
and the symptoms are definitely of swap thrashing.
So I presume what I should do is reduce the max children, and put up with
reduced spamassassin performance when a lot of mails come in.
The least amount of memory I've every had in a machine running SA 3.x is
64 MB. At best you're going to be able to have a single child, which as
long as it doesn't thrash too much (and the single child *will* hit
swap) you might be able to get "half decent" throughput assuming that
the device is doing nothing/very little else and you're only doing it
for something fun. ie. you're not likely to do better than a couple
hundred messages an hour.
If you want to squeeze a little more performance out of it, and can scan
all mail as the same user, you could disable copy_config by setting the
appropriate variable in the appropriate place in spamd.
To get even more performance with a single SA process, don't even use SA
(you'll save the overhead of the parent process). Your own daemonized
SA process or even just 'spamassassin' itself (depending on how tight
you end up for memory) might be faster.
Anyway... if you're setting this up just for the cool factor (like
having your cell phone act as a secondary DNS server), then have fun.
If your looking for serious throughput don't even bother... but you
might as well try the single child first.
Daryl
