Mailscanner CPU Use

[Ugo Bellavance]

We are running MailScanner version 4.21-9 on a Red Hat 8.0 Dual processor Intel box.  It has been running great since it was install on the new system in April. It was running under Red Hat 6.2 previously.

here are the problems
1st the number of Virii caught has dropped like a rock.  The daily average was 3-400 and it's now down to 2-4  We can trace the change back to last Wednesday when the MailScanner service was restarted. The log files show that Mailscanner is scanning email finding virii or spam marking it and sending it on it's way.  Sophs is the virus software that is running on this system and this has been kept up to date both via the monthly CD and the automated process. The automated process runs hourly. It does not seem possible that the number of Virii has decreased this much. That's very hard to swallow..

2nd problem. Mailscanner is Consuming a Huge amount of CPU. Like 90% of each CPU. It's MailScanner, because if you stop the Service the CPU use Drops to near zero.  There is plenty of Diskspace available and the system does not seem to be I/O bound. 

Does anyone have suggestions?

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--Wednesday, isn't Sobig's death?

aside cpu usage, what is your average system load?

how many mailscanner child process do you have running?

Ugo