I have been using SpamAssassin, but I have had problems where incoming spam causes the server to become unresponsive for long periods of
Although I'm not an expert with Perl, I've installed spamassassin at several companies and have never seen lockup or hanging with it. I use postfix, mailscanner, spamassassin, fuzzy ocr, and clamav solution.
At the school district I work at this configuration handles 6000-7000 messages a day without any performance issues. That's running a SuSE SLES10 install and it's running on a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz Xeon with 1GB of memory - nothing spectacular.
At some other smaller sites, same configuration and using Debian with much lower hardware spec's (e.g. Pentium 4 2.8Ghz 512MB) and again I've not seen any type of spamassassin issues. The mail amount at these other sites range from 200-3000 messages a day.
Is there anything in the logs that you can find out where your problems are stemming from?
dan