Boosting MailScanner with ClamAV on Busy Servers
Over the last few weeks I've seen the load of our external mail gateways rise steadily. Our MailScanner installation uses two virus scanners to detect malware: Clam AV and a commercial product. The CPU utilization of the machines was going through the roof.
This morning I activated Mail::ClamAV, tweaked two settings in MailScanner.conf and the results are impressive. This graph shows the CPU utilization for one of the boxes:
Within a few minutes, the machine's load average immediately dropped to the ground and the CPU utilization has gone back to normal. The reason is obvious: instead of MailScanner forking a new clamscan process for each message, it now loads the signatures once and performs the scan from within the Perl module.
Stefan Neufeind wrote on 14-Jun-07 at 1:05 am
Or if you can use the clam-daemon (clamd) and clamdscan. Works excellent as well!