[clamav-users] Services Difference & Memory Utilization

[Frans de Boer]

On 14-09-2020 09:55, Per Jessen wrote:
> G.W. Haywood via clamav-users wrote:
>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> On Sun, 13 Sep 2020, bobby via clamav-users wrote:
>>
>>> I noticed on my CentOS 8 machine, there are two different services
>>> listed: clamd at multi-user.service  and system-clamd.slice.  I don't
>>> have enough memory to run the first one, but only the second one
>>> (192M).  Is clamd really running?  What is the difference between
>>> these two services?  I only have 2 GB of memory.  Is there any way to
>>> run clamd? I get this error when I try to run it ...
>> You *might* *just* *possibly* be able to run clamd on a system with
>> only 2G of RAM
> It _can_ be done, using cgroups to restrict the amount of memory used,
> but it'll be doing a bit of swapping.
>
> For email processing, we run clamd on virtual machines with slightly
> less than 3Gb memory, of which clamd takes up 1Gb.
>
>
>
Just a note: until about a year ago I had a mail and web servers running 
on a 32-bit Pentium III which had a whopping 768 MB RAM. It did the job, 
but over time I noticed that I started getting email increasingly 
flagged as "not scanned" due to timeouts by amavisd or clamd. Of course 
the system was swapping like hell.

That was the time that clamd "only" consumed 700+ MB, as opposed to 
today where it now takes over 1.2 GB in a basic setting.
And yes, the mail and web servers now runs on an 10-year old 64-bit 
machine with 16 GB memory. I even have structural CPU time to run BOINC 
processes on my server again.

So, 3GB is enough for now as speed is mostly not a real issue. Looking 
at the increased rate of memory consumption by clamd and factoring in 
the fact that developers of all walks are rather sloppy with memory 
consumption, it will not take that many years before you have to switch 
to a 64-bit machine with 8 GB or more too.

--- Frans.

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