How to handle high CPU load on MetaDefender Core server?

Hardware factor

When encountering high CPU utilization on your MetaDefender Core server, first verify that the system meets the minimum hardware requirements for your respective engine package:

• Windows system requirements
• Linux system requirements

As a reference, you can see Performance and Load Estimation metrics (throughput, CPU utilization, processing time), to estimate required hardware resource that could meet your throughput and processing time requirements.

Software factor

If the system meets the requirements, there are other software factors that can affect CPU utilization, as outlined in the MetaDefender Core Performance Tuning Guide:

• MetaDefender Core version: older versions may not have the best performance optimization.
• Engines and database: processing with more engines and using local PostgreSQL database can increase CPU usage on the server.
• Configuration: more thorough scan settings (such as deep scans, archive scanning) require more hardware resources.
• File characteristics: more complex file types require more resources to scan and process.
• Concurrent scans: higher concurrent scans require more resources.
• Integration method: how MetaDefender Core is integrated into other applications (e.g. via APIs) can influence performance.

Details on these software factors, and software tuning guide to avoid high CPU utilization can be found in the MetaDefender Core Performance Tuning Guide.

You can export MetaDefender Core’s processing history as CSV format, and analyze which file types are being processed the most, for example:

If you see that there are many archive file types, you may need to adjust archive handling limits (max recursive level, max total extracted files, max total size of extracted files) in MetaDefender Core workflow.

• A higher limit means MetaDefender Core needs to dig deeper to process these files, so incrementally reduce the limit and observe CPU utilization.