My system never seems to get above 600 MB of RAM and it's quite busy, so
I wouldn't waste money there. I did however recently upgrade from 3.06
Ghz Xeons with 512 KB of cache each to 3.20 Ghz Xeons with 1 MB cache
each and it definitely made a bigger difference that the Ghz alone as
that would have been mostly unnoticeable. Since Windows will keep
frequently accessed files in memory, and Declude requires reading in
over 50 files on each fully scanned message in my config, the CPU cache
seems to speed this up even more. Xeons are challenged when it comes to
memory bandwidth, and they have improved performance by steadily
increasing the amount of L2 cache which prevents the system from needing
to go out the memory bus for stuff that the OS might be caching there,
and that is much faster to do. So it seems like getting processors with
extra cache is worth it in this case, though on things like every day
Web serving it probably will make little difference.
Based on my disk I/O experiences, it would seem that you need about one
active disk for every 30,000 messages a day in volume. An active disk
would be just one in a mirror, each disk in a span, or the number of
disks in RAID 5 minus one. If you go below this level, you do seem to
start getting bottlenecks, and of course not all RAID controllers nor
disks are created equally. It is even more important to keep your OS,
spool and mail box partitions defragged, and separating them is best.
The logging is a fragmentation nightmare between both IMail and Declude,
and the mail boxes will also get fragmented if people don't generally
empty them out when checking E-mail (Web mail for instance). Note that
going nuts with disks won't help much once you are past the bottleneck
because despite the number of disks, small files, like those
corresponding to incoming E-mail, are not past 64 KB stripe sizes and
are not going to be written to more than one disk (except the CRC in
RAID 5 of course). Some people like spanning, but the math seems to say
that with a fixed number of disks, you get the necessary redundancy and
better performance with RAID 5. I have not found that things like
Write-back caching or extra cache on the controller helps, and higher
RPM drives should help for some things, but it doesn't seem to help with
mail scanning as the difference in latency is fairly minimal.
My favorite way to make my system handle more however is through
efficiency. This could be anything from faster virus scanners, to
defragging partitions, to removing huge custom body filters in Declude,
to disabling tests when your delete weight has been reached, to removing
nobody aliases and therefore blocking huge volumes of E-mail that would
no longer need to be scanned. Every one of us has inefficiencies in
place in one way or another, and some are very easy to fix. If I was
running the same config as I was about 1 1/2 years ago, I would need at
least 3 times the processing power that I have now. I would actually
start there before considering a new server just because of load.
Matt
Colbeck, Andrew wrote:
James, I've no information on how "multithreaded" Declude is, but since
each instance of declude.exe operates separately, then yes, more CPUs
does help. Faster CPUs also help, because most of the CPU time you seen
declude.exe taking up is spent on JunkMail Pro text filtering.
Other built-in content inspection tests like BASE64 and NOLEGITCONTENT,
and COMMENTS, any external test, like antivirus or Message Sniffer will
also consume CPU, and more and faster CPUs will definitely help.
RAM usage isn't big, but keep in mind that you don't want some huge quad
Xeon 3 GHz monster with an under-matched IDE drive! Scale the whole
system.
Andrew 8)
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Nelson
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 1:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] Declude & multiple processors
I haven't been able to come up with any definitive answers, but does
Declude support multiple processors? I'm thinking of upgrading to a new
mail server and have been noticing declude seems to be one of the major
cpu users (many instances of it each using a reasonable amount) on my
current server, and this appears to be the major bottleneck
Thanks,
::James Nelson.
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