Hi there,
On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 Gordan Bobic wrote: > Can anyone explain why clamd 0.95.3 might use 190MB of RAM after 5 > days of light usage (few hundred emails)? It is the single biggest > process on my mail servers, and I'm not convinced it's size is > reasonably justifiable. It's perfectly normal. At the moment, each of my clamd processes uses a little over 200M. The important thing to watch is how it changes with time. Every now and then I'll plot a graph, and investigate any unexplained changes. http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/misc/clamav-milter-0.88.7.jpg http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/misc/clamav-milter-0.91.1.jpg http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/misc/clamav-milter-0.94.1.gif http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/misc/clamd-0.95.3.gif http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/JOS/misc/virus_database_count.gif I doo sometimes see sudden step changes but they're usually artifacts of the, er, fragile data collection process in my systems rather than signs of a bug. There were some problems with multiple loading of the databases and memory leaks a while ago but I think they've been solved for a quite while. From the behaviour of my clamd daemons, the memory consumption of the current version seems fine to me. > The database files under /var/lib/clamav use about 70MB. > So, even assuming this is kept in memory at all times, where does the > other 120MB come from? Your approach is much too simplistic. The database contains regular expressions. These are not necessarily used verbatim by the scanning engine, they may have to be compiled first. This can result in much greater memory usage than the database file sizes might suggest. If you have a mail server which is exchanging mail, scanning for viruses and doing very little else I would suggest that a gigabyte of RAM is a reasonable starting point, and fifteen to twenty percent of that for malware scanning is also reasonable. Two gigabytes would be better if the machine is at all busy. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://www.clamav.net/support/ml
