Slow virus scanning

Kip Turk nospam at WCC.NET
Thu Aug 8 16:23:27 IST 2002


I'm noticing a major slowdown on one of my scanning systems due to slow
passes through McAfee.  On my dual P3 1.2GHz machine with 1GB of RAM, I
get the following:

Aug  8 10:03:35 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
2543512 bytes in 120 seconds
Aug  8 10:06:18 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
6419661 bytes in 155 seconds
Aug  8 10:06:29 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
1965103 bytes in 6 seconds
Aug  8 10:06:42 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
848385 bytes in 8 seconds
Aug  8 10:06:54 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
924177 bytes in 7 seconds
Aug  8 10:07:06 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
1052457 bytes in 9 seconds
Aug  8 10:07:21 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
2507492 bytes in 12 seconds
Aug  8 10:10:26 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
7166859 bytes in 180 seconds
Aug  8 10:10:38 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
3183740 bytes in 6 seconds
Aug  8 10:13:18 mspiggy1 mailscanner[20400]: Scanned 100 messages,
7290147 bytes in 159 seconds

So a big chunk of the messages are taking inordinately long amounts of
time to scan.  On my second box (dual P3 600MHz with 512MB RAM) all the
scans are in the 1 to 10 second range.  The systems are both running
mailscanner 2.31 with identical versions of McAfee and mailscanner.conf.
Any ideas why my bigger box is moving mail so slow?  I'm ending up with
1000+ messages waiting to be scanned and even isolating this box from
the world, it takes 15 minutes or so to fully flush mqueue.in.  I'm
about to test F-Prot, but thought I'd look for other ideas also.

Thanks,
--
Kip Turk, RHCE                                       spamdies at wcc.net
Systems Administrator/Killer of Spam/Writer of Code/Penguin Proponent
West Central Net - tel: 915.234.5678 / 800.695.9016 fax: 915.656.0071
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