Mailscanner message delays / load issue

[Jason Ede]

Which version of clam are you using? Are you using clamavmodule or clam or clamd in your mailscanner.conf file?

Jason
________________________________
From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Alistair Carmichael [Alistair.Carmichael at ntltravel.com]
Sent: 26 June 2007 09:30
To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
Subject: Mailscanner message delays / load issue

Hi,

Over the past few months we have noticed a steady increase in the load on our 2 mail scanner servers and in the last few days messages have been substantially delayed between being collected from the inbound mailqueue to the outbound mailqueue. We are running mailscanner  version mailscanner-4.53.8-1 on centos running linux kernel 2.6.9-55 and using sendmail 8.13 as the MTA and clamav as the anti-virus software and spamassassin as the anti spam software.
We receive approximately 30,000 messages each day which are handled by a cluster of 2 servers via DNS round robin, the load on both machines is steadily at about 5,5,5 with clamscan processes constantly being at the top of the process list in terms of cpu usage. We are also seeing log entries similar to this constantly appearing in the maillog.
MailScanner[31171]: Commercial scanner clamav timed out!
MailScanner[31171]: Virus Scanning: Denial Of Service attack is in message l5Q7bntD008994
Both servers are high powered machines only running the mailscanner software (xeon 2.8 cpu and 2gb ram in each machine)
Is there a reason that the load would be so high as there’s not a huge quantity of email going through the servers for what I would expect them to handle, or if there are any configuration tuning that can be done in mailscanner to resolve this (we’ve fine tuned the time out settings in sendmail to minimise message delays but this hasn’t lowered the load or message delivery time)

Thanks for any help
Al


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