On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Michael Parker <park...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Apr 10, 2012, at 4:12 PM, Julian Yap wrote: > >> I'm running SpamAssassin 3.3.2 port revision 6 (latest from FreeBSD >> ports) on FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE 64-bit. >> >> I recently upgraded my Perl from 5.10 to 5.14 but I needed to >> downgrade because SpamAssassin was crashing on a daily basis. See >> bug: >> https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6745 >> >> I have since downgraded my servers to Perl 5.10 and Perl 5.12. >> >> I have noticed that Perl 5.12 runs noticeably slower compared to 5.10. >> I think 5.14 was slow as well. >> >> Average scan times are higher and there are often more 'longer >> running' scans. This results in more output on servers running Perl >> 5.12: >> tail -f /var/log/maillog | grep 'identified spam .*[2-9][0-9].[0-9] seconds' >> >> Have others experienced the same thing? > > I think you can back that up and say that anything > 5.8 is slower. In perl > 5.10 they made major changes to the regex engine which must have added some > overhead that now slows things down. I've seen instances, depending on the > total number of rules running, of 50% slowdowns moving from 5.8 -> 5.10 and > beyond.
Hmm, thanks for the info. It certainly explains things. Yeah, SpamAssassin previously used to blaze through mail scans (everything scanned in less than 3 seconds) on the same hardware. It's annoying that Perl is getting slower over time and there's no way to stop it because older versions of Perl get deprecated. - Julian
