On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Kelsey Cummings wrote:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
The MTA is mostly irrelevant -- you wouldn't put your queues on a netapp would you?
I would! In fact that would be my number one reason for using a NetApp if I was running marketing mailing lists or carry high volumes of email.
When using postfix and queueing email through port 25 on a single scsi 160 disk you can get only 11 messages queued per second. Why? It when queing email the biggest bottle neck is how fast the drive can seek as it is very intensive on seeks. That is at least with the standard postfix (safe writing) configuration.
Also if you have a large backlog of a few thousand messages, if you run mailq, you will see the machine choke on a standard drive.
It's all about your LDA and POP/IMAP servers. You'll must run Maildir, or you'll be in for trouble. You'll want to run Maildir++. Using a hacked courier server, our pop servers can login and return a UIDL for a box with 50k messages in it in under a second. We also hacked procmail to do Maildir++.
That is pretty cool however after you load 50K messages in under a second you will find that bandwidth and the speed at which the client can process the headers is the biggest bottleneck. Still it is not a bad idea to be able to load in 1 second.
Maren.
-- Kelsey Cummings - kgc@sonic.net sonic.net, inc. System Administrator 2260 Apollo Way 707.522.1000 (Voice) Santa Rosa, CA 95407 707.547.2199 (Fax) http://www.sonic.net/ Fingerprint = D5F9 667F 5D32 7347 0B79 8DB7 2B42 86B6 4E2C 3896
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