From: "Jeremy Fowler" <jfowler@westrope.com> Subject: RE: Postfix and bogofilter Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 08:41:19 -0500 Message-ID: <MFEGKJBMPCLPMMMBAACNKEOHNIAA.jfowler@westrope.com>
> So if the antivirus you have only has a command line
> version, amavisd will end up spawning processes for each email anyway.
Allow me to correct myself on something here. What I meant to say is that
amavisd will have to fork a new process to call the antivirus program which will
then load into memory along with all it's virus data files, scan the email
message for viruses, and then exit. AMaViS will retrieve the exit code to find
out if the message is ok. The spawning of a process isn't what's bad, it's the
fact that the antivirus program along with all it's virus data files must be
loaded into memory from the hard drive. This is what slows the process down.
Sophie runs as a daemon as well, and listens on a local UNIX socket for a
connection. It too will end up spawning a separate process to scan the message,
but since sophie is already loaded into memory the time it takes for that
process to start is considerably less.