[Mimedefang] Memory usage/number of slave processes

[John Scully]

I am just in the final stages of bringing up a filtering server using
sendmail 8.12.9, mimedefang 2.36, spamassassin (including full RBL
checks and DCC) and clamav.  The server is a P4 2.8Ghz, 1G ram

I have found that the slaves are using 25M of memory each, with very
little of that shared.  Is this normal?

Right now I can bury the server with just a few messages per second,
because mimedefang runs up to whatever maximum number of slaves I set
because of the delays from spamassassin.

As I roll traffic over to this system I expect load to reach between
100K and 200K messages per day, and I know I will need multiple servers
load balanced, but right now I am thinking that I will need 5 to 10
servers for filtering alone...which seems a little extreme.  I currently
have a single much lower performance box handling all inbound mail (with
no virus or spam checking) with no problem.  

I would appreciate any input from anyone out there using virus checks,
spammassassin on a similar platform.  What kind of load can it handle,
and how many slaves does it peak at?  I am concerned that I have
something configured wrong causing extra delays.

Also, what are you doing to throttle load?  Limiting child processes in
sendmail.cf?

John Scully