[Mimedefang] mimedefang.pl memory use

[David Eisner]

BACKGROUND

I'm currently testing MIMEDefang 2.42 on a PC running Red Hat 9
with just 128 MB of RAM (too little for a production server, obviously). 
I'm using SpamAssasin 2.63 and Razor 2.40.  Only my mail is going
through the "server". 

I ran into a situation where somebody comment-spammed my blog and
I received about 20 notification emails at once.  This forked off the
max number of mimedefangl.pl slaves (10), causing my server
to thrash.  None of the slaves finished within the 10 minute
busy timeout.  So I brought the max slaves down to 4, and when the
blog server tried to send the messages again, at least some of them
got through, with the rest producing  "451 4.7.1 Please try
again later" errors.  All the mail eventually got through.


QUESTIONS

Now I'm trying to figure out how much memory N slaves
running simultaneously require.

I notice that the mimedefang.pl slaves are fairly big in terms
of reported memory size:

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
 3658 defang    16   0 30752  23M  2204 S     0.0 19.3   0:08   0 
mimedefang.pl
 3678 defang    17   0 28700  23M  1500 S     0.0 18.9   0:06   0 
mimedefang.pl
 3666 defang    15   0 28664  23M  1464 S     0.0 18.7   0:06   0 
mimedefang.pl

The first thing I'm trying to understand is: what's using the memory?

Using the perl debugger, I noticed that just importing
Mail::SpamAssassin brings the total size up to 20+ MB. 
Of course, this entails importing quite a few other modules in the
process.

Is any of this memory shared between the slaves?  Do N slaves
require N x 25 MB of RAM? 
 
Thanks in advance.


-David

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D a v i d  E i s n e r        c r a d l e @ u m d . e d u   
CALCE EPSC                         University of Maryland