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Over the past week I have been noting that my cpu has been maxing out at 100%. Eventually I tracked that the freshclam deamon was consuming 75-80% of my cpu cycles. freshclam is associated to the anti-virus clamav software. I removed clamav software but still the freshclam deamon restarts on reboot of machine.

I was able to stop deamon

/etc/init.d/clamav-daemon stop /etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam stop

and I tried to remove from startup

update-rc.d -f clamav-daemon remove update-rc.d -f clamav-freshclam remove

but alas does not work, freshclam is running on restart.

To quote the bard (slightly modified) "Will no one rid me of this troublesome deamon" Assistance would be appreciated.

David M
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2 Answers2

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update-rc.d is deprecated in favor of using systemctl instead, part of SystemD, from 16.04 onwards.

Try using the following commands instead:

sudo systemctl disable clamav-daemon
sudo systemctl disable clamav-freshclam

Note that you can.ot completely remove these, if you intend to use the antivirus again, and you'll need to have at least the ClamAV Daemon running because that's what does the actual scanning from a clamscan call. However, this should disable the two processes at startup.

Thomas Ward
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I'd reinstall clamav and clamtk, as you probably don't have a problem. You'll see some CPU usage when clamav is updating its virus databases, or if it's doing a scan.

Both the database update, and the scans, can be scheduled using the scheduler icon in the clamtk GUI interface. If you configure both, it'll install two cron jobs to kick them off (in the middle of the night, or whenever you have them scheduled for).

I'd also make sure that you have the latest GUI installed...

sudo apt-get update
sudp apt-get install clamav clamtk

Go to https://dave-theunsub.github.io and download the latest clamtk GUI and install it.

Start clamtk, click the scheduler icon, and configure the database updates and scan times.

heynnema
  • 73,649