memory footprint

[Julian Field]

At 07:50 15/02/2003, you wrote:
>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.

Indeed.

>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?

MailScanner will only work with Perl 5.005 or above.

>Is there any way to slim mailscanner down, especially the parent process?

As it is virtually all swapped out, what's the point?

>Where would I want to start looking if I had some perl experience and were
>willing to do some hacking on my own?

The source :-)
--
Julian Field
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