Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : clamd really necessary/useful on VPS?

[catfished]

I'm running WHM 11.15.0 cPanel 11.18.3-R21703 CENTOS Enterprise 4.5 i686 on virtuozzo - WHM X v3.1.0. I'm on a fully managed plan. Clamd has been using over 20% of my VPS's memory lately. I restart Exim and it drops it back to under 10% but it usually builds back up to 20% in an hour or so. My host basically says that this is the nature of the beast and is suggesting disabling clam altogether but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I have never even received an email that had a virus removed by clam that I'm aware of. I'm pretty sure my clients are all using some sort of AV anyway. So maybe I don't need it?

[Ronald_Craft]

How are you sure? Have you checked the logs? Are you able to accept the blame if your clients suddenly become the target of malicious emails and your server fails to catch them because you removed clamd?

I would either increase your memory, do some tweaking on clamd to lower the amount of resources it hogs (there's info on the net on how to tweek it) or look for an alternative.

Even if I never got a single piece of spam or trojan'd email I would still not leave anything to chance.

[catfished]

Thank you for your response 1stStrike. I don't know much about this, my host is suggesting that clam is not important, I'm trying to get some other opinions, thanks for your input.

Anyone else have an opinion?

[HoundOfTheSmith]

Recent versions of clamd have a reduced memory footprint over older versions. If you don't mind the performance impact, you could run a non-daemonised scanner.

[catfished]

Originally Posted by HoundOfTheSmith

Recent versions of clamd have a reduced memory footprint over older versions. If you don't mind the performance impact, you could run a non-daemonised scanner.

Thanks for your reply HoundOfTheSmith, I'll mention that to my host.
I can't believe I'm not getting more opinions on this.