Mailscanner CPU Use

[Mike Kercher]

I suspect the drop in viruses is due to Sobig timing out last week.  I think
all of have seen that reduction.

As far as CPU goes, how many child processes are you allowing (from
MailScanner.conf)?

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of William Mahler
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 1:27 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Mailscanner CPU Use


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?
Bill
----------
William R. Mahler
IIT
Ithaca City School District
wmahler at icsd.k12.ny.us
phone ( 607) 274-6802