[Mimedefang] large mimedefang setup

[Cor Bosman]

Hi all, we took a pretty large mimedefang setup in production today.
We're scanning all outgoing customer email, about 3 million a day.
In peak over 100 a second. We started out using 3 virus scanners
but we quickly noticed clamd couldnt keep up. For some reason it was
blocking all email if it was busy with scanning a virus. Seeing as it
looks as if it uses a threaded model, it should be able to cope just
fine. Our other 2 scanners were doing ok, with scantimes measured in
0,00X seconds. 

Anyone know of any issues with clamd/freebsd 4.10 and faulty threading?

If anyone is interested, we're using 15 dual 3 ghz (hyperthreaded to 4)
servers with 4GB memory each. MFS mimedefang tmp directory. The load
on the servers is about 0.3, CPU around 90% idle. We use so many servers
because we have a policy that 30% of the servers should be able to handle
the load. Unfortunately it seems that means we need to add a few servers
because at 5 servers the load goes up quite a bit. Anyone know of any
performance figures we could compare against to see if we have some
problem?

The next phase will be even more interesting. That'll be for incoming
email, which is quite a bit more. We already have 40 servers humming away
for that :) That'll have user-configurable virus and spamfiltering.

Fun fun,

Cor