Will high whitelist row count adversely affect performance?

[Dennis Willson]

At the very least it will consume a lot more memory. Are you using 
MailWatch? MailWatch adds some modules that allow you to put your 
white and black lists into a mysql database. The modules that come 
with MailWatch read everything from the database into memory, then 
operate out of memory so they will still use the same amount of 
memory, hosever I rewrote that module to do "on the fly" database 
accesses and does not keep the list in memory. Based on the 
measurements I took, the server could receive several hundred thousand 
email a day without the "on the fly" lookup effecting performance. 
Much less memory is used on the mail server.

Another plus is by using MailWatch, users can login and setup their 
own black and white lists (if you allow it). 

Remember that normally each MailScanner child has its own complete 
copy of the configuration and rules. So take the amount of memory need 
to store your config and rules and multiply that the number of 
children you have defined for MailScanner. Which is why I wrote the 
dynamic lookup module.

Hope this helps.


On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:22:04 -0500
  <donald.dawson at bakerbotts.com> wrote:
>We are running MailScanner 4.52.2 and Spamassassin 3.1.1 and are 
>wanting
>to increase our white list for known valid addresses.
>
>Currently we have about 10k rows in the file, but want to know if
>increasing it to 30k will adversely affect performance.
>
>We use HP DL boxes with 2 CPU's and 2 GB of memory.  We currently do 
>not
>have any performance issues.
>
>Thanks,
>Donald
>
>Donald Dawson
>Security Administrator
>Baker Botts L.L.P.
>713-229-2183
>
>


--------------------------------------------------
Dennis Willson

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