Re: exim4, sa-exim, clamav

[Clive Menzies <clive@clivemenzies.co.uk>]

On (21/07/05 16:21), Chris Bannister wrote:
> Ok. I have downloaded exim4-daemon-heavy, spamassassin, spamc
> 
> And have been playing around. I set up mutt using the example in the
> spamassassin package, + procmail with spamc entries
> 
> and when I hit R (macro index R "!/usr/bin/sa-learn --sync") my poor
> laptop (133Mhz 49M -- don't laugh I got it as a 'brick' for $12.00 NZD)
> almost died, killed postgres, a vim session I didn't realise I had open
> and 2 bash shells. :-(
> 
> I sent a local email as a test and spamd had a fit for about 10sec. I
> downloaded 6 emails via fetcmail from my isp and the harddisk had a fit
> for about 20mins!! I hate to think what would happen if I d/l 200
> messages, which is about normal for a day.
> 
> I will happily purge them now. I didn't even get to feed a spam through :-(
> 
> But I will look at some lightweight altenatives, if there is such a
> thing.

I seem to recall trying to set up spamassassin and clamav on a dual
450-Mhz G4 some time ago and suffered a similar treacle like experience.
I abandoned it because I didn't have time to investigate.

I returned to it when I acquired a 64bit laptop and no performance
degradation seemed to occur, which in spite of the difference in speed
and power, led me to think I must have misconfigured something in first
setup in some way.

Having enjoyed success with the laptop, I set up the IMAP server with
the same setup on a 1000Mhz P4 machine (nothing special circa. 5/6 years
old I guess) and it doesn't seem to be suffering slowdown when scanning
mail.  My recollection, from the first experience  was that it was after
I set up clamav that the symptoms occurred but I could be wrong.

FWIW, the server is processing several hundred mails a day without a
problem but I wouldn't suggest it's under any great load.  I may have to
see what parameters can be tuned should volumes increase.

I read somewhere recently that exim4-heavy is unnecessary if you run
sa-exim but haven't checked it out.  Perhaps you should look at
mailfilter which I used with some success a while ago.  It requires more
maintenance because you have to manually create the filters but I found
it useful during the spate SWEN garbage coming from the list.

Sorry not to be of more help

Regards

Clive

-- 
www.clivemenzies.co.uk ...
...strategies for business