This evening I was working on a client's VPS server. It is a relatively powerful account with 512MB of dedicated ram. It is running 1 drupal site along with all the fixins for running 15 email accounts. After running top I noticed it was exim. The box was getting pounded with spam, so spamassassinwas chewing up valuable resources.

A quick googling revealed this thread. I went through the suggestions of lowering the number of spamd threads and that seemed to fix the problem. This got me thinking, it just doesn't make sense to host web and email on one box anymore. With all the services out there and just seems cheaper and easier to outsource email and not have to deal with it impacting your site.

Next on my list will be migrating all email off this box and over to Rackspace :)

** Update **

I was still having problems with Exim memory usage! Until I can get a solid work around I created a cronjob that restarte Exim hourly. The logs are showing about 54K emails a day so this box is getting hammered on!