Spamassassin as memory hog

[stevea]

I've been running spamassassin on a mailserver and ... frankly the spamd processes are eating up a lot of memory, like 256MB virtual and ~57M resident times 3-5 processes.

I've googled and I suppose I can reduce the number of child processes given the low load but ... it's still a hog.

Anyone have a better alternative & some setup advise (postfix here).

[William Haller]

Losing the functionality of spamassassin is something we would consider a real blow as we filter a bunch of junk automatically to user spam directories with its information. I'd recommend just restarting the mail task with a cron job once a day. Works for us. Let the backup mail server handle things for a few seconds in the middle of the night.

---------- Post added at 03:34 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:32 PM ----------

Sorry for the late addition. I'd also seriously recommend milter-greylist running ahead of everything else. It's not an ideal solution as there are a small number of badly configured (ahem - exchange) servers that don't properly handle the reply code and won't retry, but you drastically cut down the number of messages you have to deal with in clamav and spamassassin which might help.

[stevea]

Sincere thanks William. I'm just running an internal soho server with half a dozen accounts - probably orders of magnitude less that you. Spamassassin does a good job, but I seem to get ~160MB of resident memory in use as soon as inbound mail is processed. My intention is to virtualize the mail service and I'd like to minimize the memory profile.