I've noticed that my current memory consumption of spamd (3.x), when using a number of custom rule-sets such as SARE, is relatively high (~50MB according to ps). When running with a large number of children, this would consume quite a large portion of memory. Or am I wrong here, and is a portion of that 50MB per child actually shared?
That's up to your OS.. Much of the 50MB is sharable, but you'll need an OS that does "read only, copy-on-update" (aka RCU) type forking.
Newer versions of Linux do this, and you can generally tell by looking at PS.. Most RCU type OSes will one spamd child will be large, and the others will be less than half the size. Some more oddball variants wind up always reporting the parent size, even if the pages are shared, so you might need to check the math by adding them up and comparing to the total mem availability in top.
