I recently updated Perl to 5.8.8 to try to avoid the performance problems. It did not seem to help. I am running FreeBSD 5.3 but when I upgraded to Perl 5.8.8 I did not update the ports collection, so I did that and reinstalled Perl. Perhaps one of the dependencies had a performance bug. So far I have not noticed a problem.
I will keep an eye on it. I'd like to move to FreeBSD 6.x but I think my hosting service is waiting for that branch to mature a bit more. I would really like to start using the modern threading features.
Brennan
On Sat, 06 Jan 2007 21:10:15 +0000, Paul Waring paul@xk7.net wrote:
Brennan Stehling wrote:
I have been using SpamAssassin, but I have had problems where incoming spam causes the server to become unresponsive for long periods of time. This is obviously unacceptable. I am pretty sure the biggest part of the problem is that fact that is running with Perl. I have had problems with Perl before when I wrote CGI applications where it can lock up a server if you are handling a lot of data.
Have you tried running spamassassin as a daemon - that way it won't be started each time you get a new email? This requires you running spamassassin via your mail server (e.g. Postfix) instead of through a mail delivery agent such as procmail. I use this method on my server and I've never noticed the load going above about 0.01. Searching for spamassassin spamd on Google should bring up some useful information.
Paul