I suppose this is a "piece of string" question, but I have a box configured to receive mail using Suse, Postfix, pass it through Spamassassin 3.0 and then relay it to an internal server.
Spamassassin is always invoked under a "filter" user account, so there is a single shared bayes d/b. Settings are pretty much default with all DNS based tests enabled, the machine runs bind as a caching DNS server to speed up lookups. The box is a PII-350mhz with 256mb ram and a pair of mirrored 10k SCSI drives on a hardware raid controller, things vary but the machine processes around 12,000 emails a week. I don't know much about the best ways to evaluate performance under linux, disk performance shouldn't be an issue, load averages show around 0.2-0.3, but memory usage is always near the physical limit with around 60mb of swap in use (this is going from top). I wouldn't say things are at all slow, mail takes only a few seconds to be passed through the box, but for sake of a few $$ presumably more ram is a sensible way to go? cheers, Paul
