cPanel, ClamAV and MailScanner

This is totally for my information in the future, but might be useful to somebody.

I have MailScanner installed (via this great package) and ClamAV setup to scan mail that comes through this server. The problem is that lately, ClamAV was sucking up a lot of CPU power when scanning messages. After a ton of searching around on the cPanel forums, I basically came up with this solution which dropped my load considerably. But long story short, you’re changing Mailscanner to use the clamavmodule virus scanner versus the clamav one.

• Run these comments from the command line (if you don’t know what they do, don’t bother with this at all):

  up2date -i bzip2-devel

  up2date -i gdbm-devel

  /scripts/perlinstaller Mail::ClamAV

• Edit your MailScanner.conf (probably in /usr/mailscanner/etc/MailScanner.conf). Look for “Virus Scanners = clamav” and change it to “Virus Scanners = clamavmodule”.
• Then run “killall MailScanner”, wait a bit to make sure all the child processes are killed, and then “/usr/mailscanner/bin/check_mailscanner”.

So far, the load on the server has gone down significantly (at least so far) and made pages load faster as now Apache and MySQL have more breathing room.