Bayes optimization?

[Sidney Markowitz]

Looking over the DSPAM docs recently, I saw that it converts all tokens 
to an 8 byte integer hash using CRC64 and then works only with those 
fixed length 8 byte numbers instead of variable length strings. CRC64 
may not yield perfectly unique results, but it is certainly close enough 
for the Bayes statistics.

Does anyone here have the experience with SpamAssassin's Bayes 
processing to be able to guess how much of a difference it would make, 
if any, if the Bayes db stored fixed length 8 byte integers instead of 
strings and all the comparisons were of 8 byte integers? How much would 
that change storage requirements? How would it change I/O requirements 
reading from and writing to the database?

I'm not putting this in Bugzilla as an RFE yet, because first I would 
like to get a sense if this seems worth pursuing.

 -- sidney