Re: [Exim] OT: Sizing a virus checking engine

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Author: Tom Kistner
Date:  
To: John Brooks
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] OT: Sizing a virus checking engine
John Brooks wrote:

> and (sophos) virus


I suppose you are using the Sophie daemon? If not, you really should :)

> We handle approx 250,000 emails a day and I've tested (and slaughtered) the
> virus checking on a Sun ultra 10, 1 Gb memory and 1 300Mhz cpu.


SpamAssassin typically takes a lot more resources than the virus
scanning. Two tips here:

  - use RBLs, and maybe the wirehub list too. Nico Erfurth has posted a
    sample config for those recently. This reliably stop ~50-70% of
    spams at a very low resource cost. SpamAssassin can handle the rest
    that gets through the RBL fence.


  - limit the spamd facility to messages smaller than ~100kB (YMMV). That
    will save a lot of CPU time. Spams are never really large.


> I'm thinking along the lines of a sun fire 280R 2 X 1Ghz cpus plus 4GB memory:


I wish I had such a thing :) If you fine-tune the config, maybe the
Ultra 10 could handle it too ...

regards,

/tom