Should I Disable SpamD and ClamD in my server?

I have been told that SpamD and ClamD consume a lot of resources in my server. Can this be true?

What are the disadvantages if I disable them?

What should be the best way to do? Enable or Disable?

 

They will both consume a lot of resources on your server. Specifically memory consumption.

It really just depends on your situation, to know what is best.

Is this a general shared hosting server? Or are you the only person that has an account on the server? How many email accounts are on the server? Do all of these email accounts belong to you or people you know?

If you disable clamd (this is your server-side anti-virus software) then you will be letting in more viruses into your email. If you disable spamd (SpammAssasin - your server-side anti-spam solution) then your email will get more spam.

It just depends on your situation. If the only account on the server belongs to you, and if you are the only person that has email accounts set up (or a select few individuals that you can give instructions to) then you could disable these, and use client-side filtering. Client-side filtering means that you keep the anti-virus software and definitions up-to-date on your local computer and any device that you use to check your email. And you can also use client-side spam filtering, to prevent spam messages from being displayed in your main Inbox of your email program. Basically, you off-load the virus scanning and spam scanning from the server to each individual computer that downloads email from the server. The key to this though, you have to keep your anti-virus and anti-spam measures up-to-date across all individual computers and devices.

If this is a general shared hosting server, then this may not be feasible. If you have hundreds of email users spread out across the entire world on your server, it would be difficult to inform and instruct users to use client-side filtering, and also to keep those client-side filtering measures up-to-date.

 

Hello Sparek, thank you for your reply. This is a managed VPS account. My email is run by Google domain apps. I do send out emails using the newsletter function of SMF forum site, but that is just for one domain. Other than that, I don't use email from the server.

 

If no email is coming into your server, then yes you can probably disable clamd and spamd to save memory on your VPS.

 

How much RAM usage is it going to save? I am the only person using server. I have lot of memory but less RAM

 

I think this is a terminology issue. RAM and memory are essentially the same thing. For me personally, I tend to think of a VPS having so X amount of memory (i.e. a 512MB VPS, a 768MB VPS, a 1GB VPS) because the whole environment is virtualized, it's not the same as dedicated resources.

I tend to use the term RAM to refer to the amount of memory in a dedicated server. You may have a dedicated server with 8GB of RAM or 12GB of RAM. This is because the resource is dedicated and you have full access to that complete 8GB or 12GB.

From this, I'm not really sure what the phrase lots of memory but less RAM really means.

 

Sparek, the Memory Used is always 50% of the total 1GB. But it is the server load that is always in Red. The ration can reach as high as 5.0

 

What is the output of:

ps aux | sort -r -b -k 4 | head -n 50

Code (markup):

on the server?

 

Thanks for making me realize my mistake.

I should say lot of disk space but less RAM. I think load on the servers and speed of the server depends on RAM. The load on the server is very high(25%) disk usage very low

 

How shall I use this code? All I know is to log in via WHM or PowerPanel.

Is there any software that I can use to log in my server and use your code command?

 

You can run this command in SSH as root.

You can also click on Process Manager under System Health in root's WHM. Click the Memory % header, this will sort table by Memory Usage. Clicking it once will sort it ascending. Clicking it a second time will sort it descending. In descending view, the first few processes will be the processes that are using the most memory. What does this list?

 

@masterwebby ...

Disk usage won't have any thing to do with system performance. Just because you are storing a lot of data (or not storing a lot of data) will not directly factor into system performance. (Not directly, meaning that it could from a secondary perspective... if you are consuming a lot of disk space on your server, what is writing to all of that disk space? If a process is dumping data into an error log and is continually running into errors, then this means that there is an issue with the process that needs to be addressed - poor programming or something - because it is filling up disk space by writing to the error log. But if the disk space is a one time dump, say your website is just very big and consumes a lot of disk space, then it won't be directly affecting server performance).

Are you referring to a VPS server? If so, how much memory is available on the server. Run the same steps I have detailed above to find the high memory processes on the server and determine if those processes really are needed.

With a VPS, if the host node is overloaded, or being bogged down by other Virtual Environments on the node, then this can affect your overall performance. Most of the time you get X number of CPU cores on a VPS, and X amount of memory from the host node. (Most) VPS providers oversell this, a host node may only have 16 cpu cores, they may sell 32 or more cores on the host node, banking on the fact that 16 VEs won't need their 1 dedicated CPU core 100% of the time.