mailscanner restarts

[Matt Kettler]

Charlie wrote:
> Hi,
> I was just wondering if there is a setting I can change so that 
> Mailscanner only restarts every 24 hours? It is taking too long to start 
> up and everyone's emails are queuing up for too long as a result.
> 
> Also, Mailscanner is taking at least 8-10 minutes to start up on my box. 
> It is a Pentium 4, 2.4GHz, with 1GB RAM. Is this an abnormally long time?

That's *really* long..

What's the output from running "free" look like? If you're not running an old 
version of clamav, the other likely cause is that you're deeply running into 
your swap.

Most common causes of running into swap:

1) using spamassassin with absurd rulesets like sa-blacklist that are not for 
production use. Be *very* wary of any add-on config files that are larger than 
256kb.

2) starting too many MailScanner children for your amount of memory. This is set 
by Max Children = in MailScanner.conf. There it gives guidelines based on number 
of processors, but ram amount needs to be considered too. If the box is lightly 
loaded other than mail, you should be able to run 5-6 of them without any 
trouble, which fits the recommendation for single CPUs. Unless of course you've 
got problem 1, in which case you can probably only run one child before you run 
out of memory. (sa-blacklist adds approx 400MB per child)