Thomas Ledbetter wrote:
Hi. I recently tried upgrading our anti-spam servers to run v 3.2.3. Previously we were using 3.1.7. When I tried to do this, performance took a bit hit - messages take more than double the time to scan in 3.2.3 as compared to 3.1.7. As an example, one particular test spam message takes an average of 2 seconds with 3.1.7, but 5.4 seconds with 3.2.3. Turning off network tests helps, but there is still a slight (~20%) increase in scan time even without network tests between the 2 versions. I tried the 'use bytes' hack with Message.pm and I verified that 'use bytes' is the default on most of the plugins. I tried disabling just some of the network tests by setting their scores to '0', and that didnt seem to affect scan time at all?!? Can someone shed any light as to what might be the problem here? I want to retain the network tests that we were using in 3.1.7. Is there a way to revert to the exact same network tests from 3.1.7 while using 3.2.3.?
While probably not the "exact same network tests", the two versions don't have a large difference in which network tests they do.
The difference you are seeing is that 3.2.3 fixes an issue with network tests timing out prematurely, thus 3.2.3 is more accurate. If you look, you'll notice that 3.2.3 is taking longer to scan an individual message but is not spending more processor time to do it.
For most people, simply increasing the number of spamd children will restore your previous throughput rates. Of course, in very, very large installations that may not be an option due to already being memory bound. Most installations are CPU bound way before they are memory bound though.
Daryl
