Re: [Exim] virus scanners and exim

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Author: Sheldon Hearn
Date:  
To: Michael Haardt
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] virus scanners and exim
On (2003/09/01 11:32), Michael Haardt wrote:

> Clamav is a great program, but it is quite unstable under heavy load.
> Every now and then, the threads appear to deadlock and the whole thing
> hangs. Unfortunately, the clamav driver in exiscan does not feature
> a timeout, so a hanging clamd will block Exim.


I haven't seen this on FreeBSD, where threads are emulated in userland.
I'm using a UNIX socket to talk to clamd, not TCP.

Are you sure your platform's threading model is stable for other loaded
applications (thus ruling it out as a possible cause of the problem)?

> I hope both clamav and exiscan to be fixed in that regard soon, but
> as it is, I can not recommend it for production use.


I'm blocking about 4,500 viruses a day (mean 1 virus every 19.2
seconds), and scanning about 45,000 a day (mean 1 message every 1.9
seconds); it's not even breaking a sweat. I guess production and load
are two different things. :-)

Ciao,
Sheldon.