Author: Eli Sand Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [exim] Looking for a simpler replacement to SA
Michael wrote:
> A fresh install of slackware with only the kernel, sh and basic command
> line utils is clean and simple, but it can't actually do much. I can't
> see the point of dropping useful programs because they happen to be
> highly modular and make use of existing code.
I'm not trying to drop any useful functions in this little quest, just
replace. I have been using SA for about 6+ years now and it has done me
well. I know that SA could be seen as "highly modular" - and I'm sure I'd
run a good fight with many Perl programmers who would say their code is also
"highly modular". However, there comes a point when it starts to become
over-dependant, and modularity starts to become bloat.
I don't know if my config (I turn off many features in SA) requires all
these modules I saw... I'm installing on Gentoo and was using it's package
system to see what I needed (please, no big discussion about the use of
Gentoo or using packages :P) and the list was huge as mentioned. This was
why I thought about looking for something to replace it.
If it does use all those modules though, that's a LOT of stuff to load, and
who knows if SA uses all of them for all their functionality, or just some
of their functions (in which case it slowly bloats because of loaded, unused
code). With SA, there's also the overhead of having Perl itself loaded to
run spamd, whereas if I had a compiled program/library, the overhead in code
is much lower which hopefully means less memory and cpu usage and ultimately
lower scan times too (I've seen emails with 28s scan times from SA before
:P).
This isn't so much a question of "should I be doing this?" but rather "can I
do this?".