Why doesn MailScanner support virus scanning daemons?
I haven’t supported them so far for 3 reasons: • If they die or leak resources, something needs to be watching them to make sure they get restarted. If they leak resources, eventually your mail server will run out and probably get into a nasty state. MailScanner completely re-runs itself every 4 hours (by default) in order to ensure that no resource leaks last more than a few hours. • The daemonized scanners would offer much better performance were I invoking the command-line scanner once for each message. However, that isn’t how MailScanner works (but it is how things like Amavis work). MailScanner handles messages in batches and only invokes the scanner once for each entire batch. The busier the server, the larger the batches will be, and therefore the less the overhead (per message) of running the command-line scanner. • I have very recently speed tested one (sorry, but I’m not going to get in a flame war by telling you which one) of the very big commercial virus scanners, who provi
