Spamassassin is slow - any tips or good commercial alternative?

[Richard Lynch]

Julian Field wrote:
>
>
> Rob Poe wrote:
>>>>> The concern is that I am eventually looking to have over 10,000
>>>>> users, so will be receiving, and then sending, multiple emails per
>>>>> second.
>>>>> Even now, with only 1,500 users, people have started reporting "Too
>>>>>         
>>>> many concurrent SMTP connections; Please try again later"
>>>>       
>>> Thank you James - this will be very helpful I suspect.
>>> We also are using Exim as the MTA, so any specific config advice for 
>>> Exim would also be greatly appreciated :)
>>> BTW we are using one server (Pentium 4, 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM), currently 
>>> have 1500 active paid users,
>>>  and am expecting up to 10,000-15,000 active paid users in the 
>>> future (say, 1 or 2 years from now).
>>>     
>>
>> I'd expect that only ONE P4 2.4 1g isn't enough ... 
>> If it were my configuration and I had that many users, I'd probably 
>> go more into the Core2/Xeon/some other kind of multi-core or multi 
>> processor setup, and go with at least 4 gigs of ram, making sure you 
>> also focus on using FAST drives (10k SAS raid0+1)
>>   
> Get an evaluation licence for BarricadeMX from Fort Systems 
> (www.fsl.com). This is a *very* good anti-spam system that costs less 
> than any of the other decent commercial alternatives. Even an old 
> server should be able to handle near 1 million SMTP connections per 
> day without any difficulty. Put MailScanner and SpamAssassin behind it 
> to clean up what it misses and you have a *superb* system for very 
> little money.
>
> They do 30 day eval licences for free so you can try it out. It's very 
> quick to deploy and test, and they will happily help you with that, as 
> will I.
>
> Give it a go, you won't be disappointed.
>
> Jules
>
I can give a strong "seconded" to this suggestion.   Take a look in the 
archives at my post on 7/23/2007 for a testament of our experiences.  
That was version 1.0, they are up to version 2.1 now.  It's a fine 
product with excellent support.

My 2c,
Richard Lynch
WVNET

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