Speeding up Evo 2.0 and spamassassin

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 09:56, Mark Haney wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 09:36 -0500, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> >
> > 
> > If on the other hand the bulk of these messages are spam and you have
> > control of the MTA they are being sent to then I recommend you implement
> > greylisting.  This will prevent 95% or more of the spam messages from
> > ever getting on to your system. One system I implemented greylisting on
> > was getting 3000 to 6000 spam messages a day, after greylisting it was
> > getting 4 to 8 spam messages a day.  I was seeing the system at times
> > getting bogged down trying to process all those spam messages through
> > spamassassin.  It almost reached the level of a DOS attack.  After
> > implementing greylisting the problem was resolved.  Very few spam get
> > through and spamassassin has no problem tagging those.
> > 
> 
> Well I've got greylisting on our Exchange server (yeah I know, I hate it
> too), but I have spamd checking all incoming mail during checking.  I
> guess I need to get into the guts of spamd and take a look around.
> 

What kind of volume are you seeing?  With greylisting enabled and
working correctly I would expect to see 95 to 98% of spam get blocked
before it ever gets to spamassassin.  

If you are still getting a huge volume of legitimate email and you have
confirmed that spamassassin is creating a bottle neck then you probably
need to evaluate the system you are using to process your email.  You
may need more memory (ie. it may be swapping a lot), or faster
processors.  You should take a look at top to get an feel for what is
really causing the delays. oops!  Not running a unix type system, need
to find a tool that runs under Microsoft to check the performance of the
system, memory and cpu levels are the most likely culprit.  

You might also look at putting an email relay system between your
firewalls and the Exchange server.   You can run a linux box that would
do the spamassassin filtering and greylisting and just pass on the
messages to the Exchange server and get that load off of the final MTA
system.

BTW: I doubt that Evolution has anything at all to do with the problem,
it sounds now like it is more of a resource issue on the Exchange box.



-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

"There is no statute of limitations on stupidity."
-- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.