Load average high!!!

[Joe Smith]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Vinayakam Murugan wrote:

> One of our customers has a PIII server with 128 MB RAM and a 20 GB HDD. They
> were using MailScanner 4.21 and clamav 0.60 till today. They used to face the
> problem of load averages shooting up quite frequently. I upgraded them to
> MailScanner 4.28.6-1 and clamav 0.67 today. Some time after the upgrade, I
> noticed that the load average was still shooting up to above 5. I stopped
> MailScanner. The load average came down almost immediately. I was able to
> convince the guy to upgrade to 256 MB RAM. Things seem stable now.
>
> Is this hardware configuration low for a server that is a internet router and
> a mail server  for < 1000 messages a day?

I have found 256 mb about the least I can get by with on a
MailScanner/av-of-your-choice setup.  You can throw in spamassassin and
still run ok with fairly high load as long as your custom SA rule files
aren't to large.  If you are running fairly light mail traffic ( <1000 per
day )  you can drop the max children down to 2 or 3 and maybe get by with
128 mb.