Spamassassin is slow - any tips or good commercial alternative?

[Ronny T. Lampert]

> I run an email server (Exim) which uses Mailscanner in combination with 
> ClamAV and SpamAssassin. The server scans about 15,000 emails per day. 
> SpamAssassin currently seems to take 5-10 seconds to scan even the 
> smallest email, which is unacceptable for us.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had either any tips on reducing the amount of 
> time taken to scan an email for spam using SpamAssassin to 'well under 
> one second', or if anyone can recommend a good, not too expensive, 
> commercial alternative to SpamAssassin.

To check for *all* problems please show us the output of

#> uptime
#> free
#> cat /proc/cpuinfo
#> /etc/init.d/nscd status


Then proceed with Julians suggestion:

 > My advice would be to run
 > MailScanner --debug --debug-sa
 > as that will print out all the progress of SpamAssassin, including a
 > timestamp at the start of each line so you can see where the holdups
 > are.
 > If you do that, and then show us where the holdups are, we may be able
 > to help you some more...

The holdups show you *exactly* where and what happens.


Usually it's a bad/slow/rejecting/non-caching DNS server, either in 
resolv.conf or the one you're asking.
Or some firewall issues (pyzor etc. come to mind).


Cheers,
Ronny