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clamd taking an age to start and guzzling ram

Clamd on my CentOS latest stable box takes an age to start. As in, well over half an hour. Two clamd processes get started, each of which has a VIRT of about 220m. Load average goes through the roof, values from 6-8+.

The server is a bit weedy (190MB RAM, processor I forgot), but I didn't have these problems before. They seemed to arise after running freshclam to update definitions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cantab (Post 3927191)

Clamd on my CentOS latest stable box takes an age to start. (..) arise after running freshclam

After Freshclam updates the databases Clamd needs to parse them. It then keeps its databases in memory. This makes data accessible faster and more efficient compared to loading on demand: after all it's a "server" (as in client-server). AFAIK there's no workaround for this behaviour. Configuring clamd.conf to run less threads might bring down memory usage a bit but that's a trade-off for less scanning performance. BTW 190MB RAM is way, way low.