Sophie rather than Sweep for Sophos users?

[Julian Field]

At 00:41 26/02/2002, you wrote:
>What do you think about implementing Sophie, as wrapper to scan files
>using the Sophos libsavi library?
>If those number they are reporting are true, it could be a great
>performance boost for busy mailhubs.
>
><http://www.vanja.com/tools/sophie/>http://www.vanja.com/tools/sophie/

I have looked at this, and decided against for a couple of reasons. Number
1 is the extra added complexity of getting that installed and working as
well as everything else. Configuring MailScanner seems to push the limits
of quite a few users :-)

The 2nd reason is that it won't make as big a difference as it appears.
MailScanner scans mail in batches, which get bigger as the server load
increases. So the per-message scanning overhead actually drops as the
server gets busier. Also on a lot of systems it is the spam detection that
really takes the time (waiting for DNS lookups) and not the actual virus
scanning.

So the improvement in speed would actually be very slight.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ