RAV autoupdate script causing issues today

[Dan Williamson]

I'm having the same problem as well.
4 of my servers locked, queuing several thousand emails before the calls
started to come in.

I just recently upgraded all servers to 4.23-11.
I am killing all ravav processes on the hour and restarting MailScanner.

regards,
-dan

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK]On Behalf
Of Mickey Everts
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 3:34 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: RAV autoupdate script causing issues today



On the two servers that I admin which are running MailScanner 4.20-3, the
"update_virus_scanners" script that runs hourly has been causing issues
since about 9:00 AM PST.  The root cause appears to be that
"ravav --update=engine" command is using taking way to long and using a lot
of CPU time, enough that MailScanner can't keep up it seems.  By the time I
noticed, there was several hundred messages in the "mqueue.in" directory. I
have disabled RAV for now, but I have a couple questions:

Has the "update_virus_scanners" perhaps been improved in recent versions
perhaps to make it not so vulnerable to this kind of thing?  Perhaps
external commands it calls could be "nice'd" to some level that would not
cause issue if they went awry?  Did this happen to anyone else?

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     13903  0.0  0.0  1432  444 ?        S    13:01   0:00  \_ CROND
root     13904  0.0  0.1  2048  956 ?        S    13:01   0:00      \_
/bin/bash /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
root     13922  0.0  0.1  2044  968 ?        S    13:01   0:00          \_
/bin/bash /usr/sbin/update_virus_scanners
root     13958  0.0  0.2  3284 1448 ?        S    13:01   0:00          |
\_ /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/lib/MailScanner/rav-autoupdate
root     13959 84.0  0.1  1548  676 ?        R    13:01   6:57          |
\_ /usr/local/rav8//bin/ravav --update=engine

Until now, MailScanner has been ultra-reliable for months.  Good job Julian!

Mickey
SLP