Re: [cobalt-users] SpamAssassin offloaded to another machine?

[Jeff Lasman <blists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 27 January 2004 07:53 am, Greg Hewitt-Long wrote:

> Has anyone off-loaded spamassassin to a secondary machine?

Yes.

> I have a server I'm trialling NuOnce's implementation of SpamAssassin
> (http://www.spamassassin.org) and I like the results - however, the
> server load is amazing (not so much the base product, but I have
> added 40,000 lines of custom rules in the local.cf).  Each spamd
> grabs up to 78Mb of RAM - so I'm thinking of off-loading the tasks
> undertaken by SpamAssassin to a secondary machine whose ONLY task it
> to run spamassassin and razor - has anyone done this?

We currently run our "http://www.spamblocked.net/"; services on a 1U 
server with a 1 Gig Pentium III processor and a half gig of memory.

We run an Exim mailserver with both SpamAssassin and lots of blocklists; 
using Exim we can use block lists on a domain-by-domain basis, even a 
user-by-user basis, and implement individual blacklists and whitelists.

> I'm thinking that I'll probably use or build a custom machine for
> this task, something cheap and cheerful, perhaps a colomachines.com
> box, perhaps a machine using AMD processors I have around - possibly
> building several machines using even lower specs and attempting to
> round-robin them if that's possible.

If you round-robin and use bayes you won't get the full benefit of bayes 
unless you replicate your bayes databases between the systems.

> I'd be interested in the changes to the spamassassin config files
> here on the RAQs, and experiences of a choice of OS for the separate
> box - ie, linux/BSD etc.

We're still using RHL 7.3 as our base OS, but in the future we will most 
likely switch to FreeBSD, or perhaps WBEL.

Jeff
-- 
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