thanks Jason and John..
John I really appreciated your response and list of suggestions for ASSP on the SF forum. I think each of your suggestions would improve ASSP considerably. I especially liked this suggestion
"ClamAV performance - Clam AV performance is quite terrible on my server. I think that a store and forward approach may need to be looked at to prevent my users complaining about the time it takes to send a message to the mailserver. That is if the email passes all ASSP's other checks it stores the email, checks it for virus then passes it on. This has some shortcomings and is quite tricky to implement so in the short term I am looking at bypassing AV for local users. This would be a good option also in the admin interface."
I completely agree. It just makes much more sense on the server side, and on the client side. It would be wonderful not to have to wait while perl/clamav checks the message as it's coming in. Let the server do that on its own time and let the user just get on with their day instead of waiting and waiting..
However, nothing explains why i'm experiencing upload times of 12 minutes when using outlook vs. mozilla's thunderbird - only taking about a minute - or even SM. Maybe its not an hMail issue, and more an outlook issue, but if most of my users are using outlook, I'd like to get to the bottom of this.
Ps. John - can you try your tests again remotely? Is this how you have been doing your tests as well Martin? I experienced no loss of speed when sending locally. The issue only occurs when a person tries to send (remotely) a large email to the local server.
Also - in checking the server resource stats tonight, hMailServer was running at 143 MB of ram.. What is accumulating in hmail to cause this? that can't be good. I barely even have enough users to really put a strain on it... This occurs after a days use - like todays testing with heavy attachments. After restarting the service, it was back down to 4.5.
(Just an aside - it also did not remember which emails were marked as read and unread. ie - messages that appeared as new after the last restart - and which were read, were once again marked as unread.)
Does anyone have any ideas on what I should try?
John, Jason, I may try your configurations...Is it activestate? Is there any other? I have activestate 5.8 with the windaemon installed. I've noticed issues with using 5.8 on windows so this may have something to do with assp/clamav churning the machine to pieces. I did notice perl working at 100% when messages were sent.
Lastly, I may try going back a couple of versions because I don't remember outlook ever taking this long to upload a large attachment. In fact I remember trying a 10mb attachment on a 3.0 release and being amazed at how fast it was processed.
Again, thanks again team for shedding some more light on this and john, for your efforts in posting your suggestions on ASSP in the SF forum. I really hope this does not get burried and ignored. I too agree that ASSP is otherwise the best spam blocker available. I've had great success with it.
After all this however, I think there will be a real need eventually to include a Max Attachment size in hmailserver. Seems pretty easy to bring my server down with a couple of large attachments.
Shhh don't tell anyone this though!
Off to the cottage for a few days. Go England. (they're out? already?)
Pat.