SPUG: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 is released

Tim Maher tim at consultix-inc.com
Wed Sep 29 20:44:23 CDT 2004


FWIW, here are my early impressions of the new version of SpamAssassin,
v 3.0.

1) It's doing a SPECTACULAR job of snaring lots of crap that used
   to leak through SpamAssassin 2.*, with absolutely no
   additional configuration on my part. In this respect, it's
   been a huge win for me over its predecessor, which let approx.
   100 messages through every day (after catching thousands).

2) Suddenly, my formerly adequate Pentium III @ 966 Mhz feels
   like a Pentium II at 150 Mhz. Although I've always used the
   daemonic approach (via spamd) to process incoming mail
   without the inefficiency of continually restarting a big
   process, there's barely a moment during any day when spamd
   3.0 isn't bogging down the CPU. I feel like I've gone back in
   time by 15 years, which was the last time I had to routinely
   wait 3 seconds after hitting CR to get the next shell prompt
   -- and I'm running spamd with the full 19-point nice-ness
   penalty to boot!

I recognize that I may have goofed up somehow in the
installation, or ruined its performance in some other manner on
my own, but that interpretation of my results seems very unlikely
to me, given that all I did was run CPAN to install, stop the old
spamd, and start the new one. (after giving up on running
c_learn, due to a problem with Net::DNS).

So if my experience is any indication, I'd recommend that people
having sub super-computer machines think twice or thrice about
upgrading to v3.0, because, if my experience is typical, it can
be a huge drag on system performance.


Tim
P.S.  Some nerdly statistics: CPU usage averages about 5%, RSS
      about 27meg, memory about 9%, and swapping zero.

*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
| Tim Maher, CEO     (206) 781-UNIX      (866) DOC-PERL     (866) DOC-UNIX |
| tim(AT)Consultix-Inc.Com  http://TeachMePerl.Com  http://TeachMeUnix.Com |
*+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-*
| Watch for my upcoming book: "Minimal Perl for Shell Users & Programmers" |
|  Classes:  UNIX Fundamentals for "Power Users", October 4-7, Seattle WA  |
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*


More information about the spug-list mailing list