[clamav-users] clamd using ~1GB memory on Debian Stretch

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Mon, 13 May 2019, Avinash Sonawane wrote:

> e.g. I am expecting an email at 6 PM.  I don't mind clamd taking
> that much of a memory *at* 6 PM and then release it. I find it
> absolutely inconvenient to having to forgo ~1GB memory since the
> morning. As I said, a poor bargain.

The bargain is the one that you made when you installed ClamAV.  If
you now feel that it is a poor one, you can of course uninstall it at
no extra charge.

Also consider that the email that you receive at 6PM might conceivably
contain something which could completely destroy _all_ the software in
your computer system.  Perhaps not such a poor bargain then, if ClamAV
manages to prevent this malicious message from doing its nasty work?

You will probably agree that your use case is unusual (even I get more
mail than you do... :).  Unfortunately it is difficult to accommodate
the needs of every user within a single package.  It is unlikely that
the development team will schedule big changes to ClamAV for a single
user who receives one single email per day.  The same install is used
by some people on this list to scan more than one message every single
second of every single day; the design of ClamAV appears to suit those
people better than it suits you.

There is still some hope, however.

The ClamAV source code is published.  If you want to contribute code
which reduces the memory consumption of clamd without making serious
compromises in performance, I'm sure that people here will be pleased
to take a look at it.

Incidentally I normally run three copies of clamd on the a single mail
server.  Each copy uses 1GB RAM.  On a typical day, the server sees a
few thousand to a couple of tens of thousands of attempts to send mail
to it; thankfully most of the time it's at the lower end of the range.
The last time any of them found anything was on 26 September 2018, and
speaking personally I'm more than happy with that.

--

73,
Ged.