memory footprint

[Michael Weiser]

Hello,

I'm running mailscanner 4.12-1 with SpamAssassin-2.44 on a rather small
leaf node scanning mail for viruses using sophos and f-prot. The machine
runs RedHat Linux 8.0 with perl 5.8.0 in the Linux-Distri-typical
max-feature-install.

After some time mailscanner's memory consumption will look something like
this:

PID     PPID    SIZE    RSS     SWAP    COMMAND
                                (sz-rss)
31942   1       10556   1940    8616    /usr/bin/perl
32132   31942   19004   17044   1960    /usr/bin/perl
32391   31942   19140   17284   1856    /usr/bin/perl

So I understand that perl is rather fat in its footprint all by itself
which accounts for the 19MB for the two children. But from the fact that
almost all of the parent gets swapped out I suspect that it doesn't do
much more than see that the two children stay alive.

Are these assumptions correct? What do others see with different versions
of perl?

Would it make sense to compile mailscanner its own perl-5.0004 or so?
Is there any way to slim mailscanner down, especially the parent process?
Where would I want to start looking if I had some perl experience and were
willing to do some hacking on my own?
--
Thanks in advance.
bye, Micha