MailScanner very memory intensive?

[Remy de Ruysscher]

Hi all,

What is the typical MailScanner memory usage (on FreeBSD)? I found my
server to use 1,5Gb of memory just for MailScanner! Furthermore it's
processing queues very slowly (possibly due to disk swapping). I have 2Gb
installed (P4 - 3.0Ghz).

Any ideas to improve memory usage?

last pid: 72681;  load averages:  0.12,  0.09,  0.06                      
                                                            up 1+01:56:38 
09:58:39
97 processes:  1 starting, 1 running, 95 sleeping
CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.7% interrupt, 99.3% idle
Mem: 1354M Active, 340M Inact, 185M Wired, 54M Cache, 112M Buf, 70M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 613M Used, 3483M Free, 14% Inuse

  PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
  891 squid       1  76    0 39316K 23064K select   1:41  0.00% squid
  602 www         1  20    0 27172K 14116K lockf    1:39  0.00% httpd
 1054 www         1  79    0 26644K 13548K select   1:33  0.00% httpd
  604 www         1  20    0 26716K 13404K lockf    1:32  0.00% httpd
  603 www         1  20    0 26576K 13296K lockf    1:32  0.00% httpd
  606 www         1  76    0 26528K 13244K select   1:32  0.00% httpd
 1841 www         1  20    0 27044K 14024K lockf    1:32  0.00% httpd
 1875 www         1  20    0 30044K 15028K lockf    1:29  0.00% httpd
 1097 www         1  20    0 32184K 15784K lockf    1:27  0.00% httpd
 5675 www         1  20    0 26384K 13292K lockf    1:19  0.00% httpd
  738 mysql      18  20    0    98M  5476K kserel   0:51  0.00% mysqld
60795 postfix     1   8    0   470M   210M nanslp   0:50  0.00% perl5.8.8
68200 postfix     1   8    0   470M   378M nanslp   0:49  0.00% perl5.8.8
53602 postfix     1   8    0   470M 55660K nanslp   0:49  0.00% perl5.8.8
69900 postfix     1   8    0   470M   389M nanslp   0:48  0.00% perl5.8.8
72078 postfix     1   8    0   470M   389M nanslp   0:48  0.00% perl5.8.8
  829 privoxy     3  20    0  5628K  2376K kserel   0:39  0.00% privoxy

bash-2.05b# /usr/local/sbin/MailScanner --version
Running on
FreeBSD unix-asp.com 6.0-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE-p5 #16: Thu Mar  2
07:59:26 CET 2006     root at unix-asp.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DEFIANT  i386
This is Perl version 5.008008 (5.8.8)

This is MailScanner version 4.50.15
Module versions are:
1.00    AnyDBM_File
1.16    Archive::Zip
1.04    Carp
1.119   Convert::BinHex
1.00    DirHandle
1.05    Fcntl
2.74    File::Basename
2.09    File::Copy
2.01    FileHandle
1.08    File::Path
0.16    File::Temp
1.32    HTML::Entities
3.50    HTML::Parser
2.35    HTML::TokeParser
1.22    IO
1.13    IO::File
1.13    IO::Pipe
1.74    Mail::Header
3.07    MIME::Base64
5.419   MIME::Decoder
5.419   MIME::Decoder::UU
5.419   MIME::Head
5.419   MIME::Parser
3.07    MIME::QuotedPrint
5.419   MIME::Tools
0.11    Net::CIDR
1.09    POSIX
1.78    Socket
0.13    Sys::Syslog
1.87    Time::HiRes
1.02    Time::localtime

Optional module versions are:
0.17    Convert::TNEF
1.814   DB_File
1.11    DBD::SQLite
1.50    DBI
1.14    Digest
1.01    Digest::HMAC
2.36    Digest::MD5
2.11    Digest::SHA1
0.44    Inline
0.17    Mail::ClamAV
3.001000        Mail::SpamAssassin
1.999001        Mail::SPF::Query
0.20    Net::CIDR::Lite
0.57    Net::DNS
missing Net::LDAP
1.94    Parse::RecDescent
missing SAVI
1.4     Sys::Hostname::Long
2.56    Test::Harness
0.62    Test::Simple
1.95    Text::Balanced
1.35    URI


# System settings
# ---------------
#

# How many MailScanner processes do you want to run at a time?
# There is no point increasing this figure if your MailScanner server
# is happily keeping up with your mail traffic.
# If you are running on a server with more than 1 CPU, or you have a
# high mail load (and/or slow DNS lookups) then you should see better
# performance if you increase this figure.
# If you are running on a small system with limited RAM, you should
# note that each child takes just over 20MB.
#
# As a rough guide, try 5 children per CPU. But read the notes above.
Max Children = 5