CyberSoft FAQ Answers

Help With the VFind™ Security Toolkit

Q:

How much RAM and disk space does VSTK/P require?

A:

There is no easy answer to this question, it is completely dependent upon several factors including your system architecture, configuration, and load. For example, a system with 12 megs of RAM running a light load might execute VSTK/P very quickly, on the other hand a large system with 1 gig of RAM that is heavily loaded might cause VSTK/P to excessively swap. The only way to determine your needs is install VSTK/P and make adjustments from there.

On the other hand the Avatar program contained in VSTKP requires enough disk space to create it's database. Since Avatar uses compression this could be anywhere from 40% to 100% of the material to be archived, plus the database overhead. The easiest way to get a guesstimate is to create a tarball of all the files you want Avatar to manage and note the final size of the tarball. This will be close to the maximum size that the Avatar database needs. After you have figured out the maximum size use the UNIX compress command to compress the tarball. Then note the file size. This will be near the minimum size of the Avatar database.

An additional source of system usage is UAD which uses the hard disk for temporary scratch space when recursively decompressing a compound file. Since the amount of disk space is completely dependent upon the file being decomposed this is impossible to predetermined. You can however direct UAD to use scratch space in any partition or drive of your choice this includes network drives.

Finally the VSTK/P product when installed on a system uses a insignificant amount of disk space, however even this value will change depending upon your system architecture. Other important factors to consider are whether the binaries are stripped or unstripped, if you are dynamically or statically linking the binaries, and finally the size of the virus databases, which can change multiple times in a week.

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