Freshclam load (was RE: [Mimedefang] Poll: Time to drop Trophie support?)

[David F. Skoll]

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Paul Murphy wrote:

> the basis that it will be able to spread to a lot more machines
> before anyone picks up the warning and updates their signature
> files.  Doing a freshclam check consumes so little bandwidth that it
> is a no-brainer to use it.

Freshclam actually uses an astounding amount of bandwidth if you aggregate
it across all Freshclam users.  I don't have the statistics handy, but
I remember reading that each clam mirror does over 100GB/month.

I wonder if there's a very light way to announce updates?  Maybe a DNS
record with a TTL of a few minutes that gets updated with the latest
DB version string?  It might lower the load on the DB servers.  (Unfortunately,
DNS is not secure.)

--
David.