Mailscanner and memory resources

[Julian Field]

At 16:38 23/01/2004, you wrote:
>  I've started using some of the SA ruleset like tripwire, bigevil and
>such.  In doing so, I'm finding that the size of the MailScanner
>processes increase dramatically because each MailScanner process is
>essentially it's own SA process and loads all the configs and rules it
>needs.  Wouldn't it be better to just have MailScanner make calls to
>spamd thus reducing the amount of resources?

In my view, no. You are running far more extra rulesets than most people
do. Is the 119Mb per process the resident size (RSS in "top"), or just the
(larger) "size" figure quoted in "top"? It's only the RSS figure that counts.

Calling spamd would be slower and, more importantly, would rely on you
having a daemon running, which introduces a whole host of reliability and
recovery problems. I would have to write a whole system to handle memory
leaks (and other resource leaks) in spamd, and be able to detect when it
stops working properly and restart it. That's a very messy process, and is
the same reason I don't support the daemonised versions of the virus
scanning engines.

>   On my system with 2gigs of
>Ram and running 10 MailScanner processes, each process is 119megs with
>these rulesets "BIGEVIL TRIPWIRE BACKHAIR WEEDS2 CHICKENPOX ANTIDRUG
>EVILNUMBERS BLACKLIST BLACKLIST_URI"
>
>-=Bobby

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654