[Mimedefang] high-load scanning with mimedefang

[David F. Skoll]

On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Rudolph Pereira wrote:

> The former class (cmdline) seem far too slow for busy mail servers

I would think so.

> while although the
> latter are much faster, there seem to be
> far fewer products that support a memory-resident daemon, and most of
> them are expensive

CLAM AntiVirus is free.  http://clamav.elektrapro.com/

If it's feasible for your class of users, blocking .exe and friends
will block 99.99% of current viruses.

> I'm also wondering about what I should look at at getting better
> performance out of mimedefang; my tests seem to indicate about a 20%
> performance drop compared to plain sendmail.

If it's only 20%, I think that's pretty good.  If you run
SpamAssassin, that figure will probably increase a lot.
Content-scanning is expensive; there's no way around it.  Putting the
spool on tmpfs is practically required for a busy Solaris server.
Beyond that, the usual "fast CPU, fast disk, sufficient RAM" tuning is
about all you can do.

> Oh, most of my tests/work have been on a 2-cpu
> solaris 5.8/sparc machine with perl-5.005 and mimedefang 2.23

MD 2.27-BETA-1 and the forthcoming 2.27-FINAL may be slightly better on
busy servers, although the difference is small.

--
David.