clamav memory & cpu usage

[pjdevries]

I am experiencing system resource problems with clamav and although some suggest to disable it all together, because clamav is not all that good anyhow, I prefer to keep it operational. I have found a few threads concerning this topic, a few of which suggest and/or describe (how) to use clamd instead of clamscan. Some of those articles are a bit dated and the question is, if the described solutions are still valid for the current versions of ISPConfig and clamav. Another article involves the manual compilation of some components, which I prefer not to do in order to keep my system as 'standard' as possible.

Is there an up-to-date howto available or is anyone out there skilled enough to write a simple, step by step howto for the less experienced and skilled like myself?

[till]

Please have a look here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16204

[pjdevries]

Thanks for the incredible fast reply Till.

The article you refer to, is the one I meant when mentioning the manual compilation. The procedure described there involves quite a few manual modifications to various ISPConfig and other configuration files, on which I am not very keen. I guess some or all of these modifications have to be made again after each ISPConfig update, which makes such an update error prone. It also makes the system more difficult to maintain and restore after a crash.

I was hoping there was a less elaborate solution that requires not so much manual editing of configuration files. Due to my close relationship with Murphy, I tend to easily make mistakes with that. But I guess I'll just have to wait until ISPConfig supports the described solution 'out of the box'.

[Hans]

It's not a solution for your real problem, but perhaps you can add these additional lines to your /etc/postfix/main.cf file:

unknown_client_reject_code = 554
unknown_hostname_reject_code = 554
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 554
unknown_relay_recipient_reject_code = 554
unknown_sender_reject_code = 554
unknown_virtual_alias_reject_code = 554
unknown_virtual_mailbox_reject_code = 554
unverified_recipient_reject_code = 554
unverified_sender_reject_code = 554

With those lines you can reduce the incoming (spam)-messages before they reach your server. It will help you to lower your CPU-rate a little bit as well.

If you decide to use these lines, don't forget to restart Postfix with /etc/init.d/postfix restart