In recent years, the volume of spam has risen to epidemic proportions. Although estimates of the ratio of spam to legitimate e–mail vary, it is widely agreed that it makes up at least 50 percent of e–mail traffic today. This presents a particular challenge to anti–spam software. It must be intelligent enough to filter out a very high percentage of spam, while leaving virtually all legitimate e–mail messages intact. As spammers continue to invent techniques in hopes of circumventing anti–spam software, the intelligence of anti–spam technology – and the processing power needed to detect and eliminate it – must always stay ahead.

The combination of Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam (SBAS) software and the Sun Fire T2000 server is particularly well suited to the demanding task of spam filtering. Based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, a single eight–core processor can handle up to 32 threads concurrently, giving a significant performance advantage over typical single–threaded processors. This Sun BluePrints article provides background information on SBAS software and the Sun Fire T2000 server, the configuration used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti–spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels.

Sun Blueprint: Tuning Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam on the Sun Fire T2000 Server