Daryl C. W. O'Shea wrote:
>
> What's stopping you from running sa-update more frequently?  I run it
> once an hour on most of my systems.
May I propose that sa-update should become merged into spamd? (or
daemonized)

I'm thinking of lessons learned with ClamAV. Once upon a time they
relied on people running freshclam manually (via cron) to look for
updates. People loved it. Tens of thousands loved it. Update servers got
HAMMERED by people running freshclam every MINUTE.

So they did two things: Starting using DNS to tell freshclam if there
really was a new update, and got freshclam to run as a daemon - so it
could randomly sleep between lookups - and thus spread the load.

If all SA users set sa-update to run hourly - then when an update comes
out, you will have *all* SA users contacting the same sites
simultaneously for the downloads. Owwwwch...

OTOH, if a daemon (like spamd itself - or a daemonized version of
sa-update I suppose) was responsible, it could do the initial DNS lookup
every 0-3600 seconds (just an example) and download when it sees an
update - thus spreading the load.

I know putting a "sleep `expr $RANDOM / 9` && sa-update"  does the same
thing - but people won't do that...

-- 
Cheers

Jason Haar
Information Security Manager, Trimble Navigation Ltd.
Phone: +64 3 9635 377 Fax: +64 3 9635 417
PGP Fingerprint: 7A2E 0407 C9A6 CAF6 2B9F 8422 C063 5EBB FE1D 66D1

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