Scan timeout value for amavis running clamav

[Mark Martinec]

Anirudha,

> >There is a $child_timeout setting, with a default value of 8*60 seconds,
> > i.e. 8 minutes. It limits the total time for one mail message processing
> > spent in amavisd. The sublimits (virus, spam, ... scans) are derived
>> dynamically from $child_timeout and actual times spent so far.
> 
> *So does this means, a particular email would be devoted a total time of 8
> mins by amavis or would it be more?*

Yes, processing should abort after $child_timeout seconds or slightly
beyond that. This limit is much more precisely adhered to since 2.7.0,
which makes it suitable for a pre-queue filtering setup (setting the
$child_timeout to something like 45 seconds).

With 2.6.* this is more like a best effort / advisory time limit.

Still, even with 2.7.0, there may be cases (like evaluating a regexp
of a SpamAssassin rule in some degenerate case), where the limit
may be exceeded. SpamAssassin 3.3.* or 3.4.0 are much better
behaved in this respect compared to SpamAssassin 3.2.

  Mark