Spam Assassin Speed

[Nigel Wade]

J. Scott Amort wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> After reading through a few threads on Spam Assassin, and given a recent
> increase in the amount of spam arriving in my inbox, I thought I would
> give it a whirl.  It is, however, terribly slow.  I belong to several
> mailing lists, and receive anywhere from 300-500 emails a day.  It seems
> to take Spam Assassin 20-30 seconds or so to process each email!  Is
> this usual?  I have tried both the spamassassin -e and spamc approaches
> to creating an evolution filter, but it made no difference in speed
> either way.  Any tips for speeding things up?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Scott
> 
> PS I set things up by following the instructions at:
> 
> http://www.atlantawebhost.com/articles/evolution_spamassassin.php
> 
> 

Try running spamassassin in "daemon" mode - i.e. as spamd. Then filter your 
messages using spamc. You can run spamd as part of the normal system startup.

The actual spamassassin code is all written in Perl and the startup overhead 
is pretty large. When run as spamd you don't have to reload and interpret 
the Perl for every message.


-- 
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail :    nmw at ion.le.ac.uk
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555