Pat suggested that instead of trying to get the most performance out of the hard drive, I should setup a RAM disk to hold the queue. So I did, and quickly found even with that my spamtrap couldn't keep up. For now I've disabled the IP owner lookup and that helped immensely. The spamtrap caught up and has been able to keep the queue under a couple megs now.

Now that I've got it able to keep up, the figures are staggering. I'm getting 4 spams per second, which comes out to over 300,000 spams a day. And this is only from hosting a very small handful of domains.

Another thing that's crazy is that every 5 minutes I get spam from over 150 (usually over 200) IP addresses that have never spammed me before. There's no way spammers are able to assign their computers that many new addresses that quickly. They must have robots running rampant on the internet hijacking every open computer they possibly can as fast as they can. And I wouldn't be surprised if the spammers were the ones writing worms for Windoze, or at least purposely sending them out so that they can have more computers to send their spam from.

This is nuts.