>> both because it is inefficient and because >>viruses often have very large binary attachments which can >>cause SA to crash with an out of memory error, and let the
SB> Huh ? Never had that happen to me. I use the default max scanning size of SB> 256KB with spamc/spamd and I've never had a problem...
I'm glad that it doesn't happen to you, Simon. It happens to lots of other people. I can't reliably run Spamassassin on files over 30K, much less 100K. This probably depends on individual system configuration, as well as other programs and load on an individual server. SA uses a lot of memory, but whether or not a server can easily handle the load is going to vary with the system.
Yes, SA does use a lot of memory - about 20MB, but the amount of memory doesn't really change based on the message size, which was why I was expressing surprise. It takes *longer* to scan a larger message, but compared to the static overhead of 18MB for the libraries and regex's the size of the message is insignificant, at least up to 256KB....
I'd be looking at other reasons for the problem - the most likely one is making sure that whatever calls spamassassin limits the scanning concurancy to a certain set limit which is optimal for the specs of the server. Run too many copies of SA at once on *any* setup, and you're in trouble.
In any case, SA is NOT an efficient or particularly reliable way to scan for internet viruses. I think that virus scans should precede all other scans, and that can be done either with a program invoked at the gateway or a set of procmail recipes that are run before SA is invoked. There are a number of other reasons why SA is not going to work well for this purpose (but I really don't see a point in starting a debate, because I don't think anyone would disagree with this proposition, really.)
Of course... we do virus scanning before SA runs, and SA shouldn't be used as a makeshift virus scanner...
Regards, Simon
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