[clamav-users] About clamav's requirements for system resources

[Kris Deugau]

zhuangxiaohui wrote:
> Dear guys,
> 
> Thanks to your team for providing us a such wonderful anti-virus soft.
> 
> But, I got some problems there.
> 
> I have some servers(Centos6/7). Most of them have 1GB memory, 600M
> available.
> But also servers with low memory. For example 512M memory, 200M available.
> When I install the "clamav" on server which have 600M available memory and
> start the "clamd" service,
> I find that clamd's resident memory is about 500M. But on servers that have
> only 200M of available memory,
> the resident memory is about 100M. So I doubt if clamd will work properly on
> these servers, although both
> scan and database's updates are normally.
> 
> Would you please tell me the lowest clamav's requirements for system
> resources especially the memory?
> I've searched on your website but got nothing about this :(

I wouldn't run ClamAV with stock signatures on anything less than 1G, 
and I wouldn't run much else on that machine.  If you're running a very 
light workload with a dedicated machine, you might get away with 512M.

The total file size for the stock signatures totals about 450M between 
daily.cld and main.cld (the other files are under 1M), so you'd need at 
least that just to load the signatures.

My lightly-loaded personal server with just stock signatures looks to be 
using about 590M for clamd, and the much more active machines at work, 
with a couple hundred extra local signatures, look to be using about 
700M each.

I've recently been working with a legacy system that has multiple nodes, 
most with 1G of RAM, and they're running quite a few other things 
besides Clam.  Before moving a chunk of mail flow off these machines, 
they were regularly hitting swap, causing performance to drop pretty badly.

-kgd