It does help. The architecture we will be recommending is for high-volume environments and will have a stack of spam and antiV infront of it:
Greylisting Bayesian filter RBL DNS checks ClamAV etc. ...all before SA gets ahold of it. Given that, and in light of your comments, what do you think of the following basic specs as a starting point recommendation: Dual core (any) 1GB RAM Dedicated SATA drive Thanks, Jeff Hardy SmarterTools, Inc. 1903 Parkside Lane, Suite 106 Phoenix, Arizona 85027 Toll Free: 877.357.6278 ex. 7012 Local: 623.434.8050 ex. 7012 FAX: 623.434.8453 ---------------------------------------- From: Nigel Frankcom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:19 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Stand-alone SpamAssassin server specs On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 08:22:40 -0700, "Jeff Hrdy" wrote: >Our product supports SpamAssassin and comes with the Windows version. >Sometimes in high-volume environments we want to recommend SpamAssassin >to run on its own box in Linux. In this configuration we want to suggest a >server hardware >setup--including processor (type and number), Ram, RAID array #, other. > >Maybe I missed it, but I could not find a recommended server config on the >site. >Does such a recommendation exist and/or does the user group have a suggestion? >This info is for a white paper we will publish on our Web site. > The key questions are just how much mail will you be dealing with, what tests you wish to apply to incoming mail and is SA frontline or are there other systems in place to thin down the load. I run SA on 3 XPC Shuttles with AMD Athlon64, 2 Gb RAM and 2 * 250 Gb SATA HDD's. The systems originally ran with 1Gb RAM and an 80Gb SATA without any issues. I use CentOS 4.4 with SA 3.1.7 and Clam. The original system cost a little over £300 to build and has greatly exceeded expectations. To thin down the amount that SA has to deal with my Mail Server runs a number of tests before mail ever reaches SA including RBL tests, AV scanning, greylisting (for 4 hours for any IP that SA has detected as sending spam), auto-banning (for 24 hours for any IP that has sent a virus), local blacklisting and many other tweaks. The net result is that SA only sees about 20 - 30% of the spam that hits - in my case around 5,000 per day. Several of my colleagues use much older and lower spec'd machinery to deal with much higher levels of mail (P3's with 512 RAM handling 20 - 150k mails a day). Personally I'd recommend the XPC's with CentOS as a relatively cheap, low maintenance, relatively idiot proof system. Hope that helps. Kind regards Nigel
