On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Aaron Paetznick wrote: > I'm assembling several front-end MIMEDefang filter servers. These > machines will be used to filter incoming email and pass it along to our > mailstore. They will be under extremely heavy load. I'm wondering how > I/O intensive the Sendmail/MIMEDefang combination is in a setup like > this. I would also be using File::Scan and clamd.
You must, must, _must_, use a ramdisk for the /var/spool/MIMEDefang directory. Did I mention that you need to use a ramdisk for /var/spool/MIMEDefang? If you do that, then the I/O load is approximately the same as for normal Sendmail. Ideally, you want /var/spool/mqueue to be on a dedicated, fast drive. You also want to configure syslog not to flush to disk after each log message. In Linux, you do that by prefixing the output file name in /etc/syslog.conf with "-". > When used in this configuration, will CPU, memory, or I/O be the > bottleneck? Yes. Seriously, it depends on the e-mail pattern. Memory pressure is usually quite high on busy machines; you want lots of RAM. Once you have enough memory, CPU and I/O pretty much fight it out evenly for the honor of being the bottleneck (at least on a well-configured machine.) Regards, David. _______________________________________________ Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.canit.ca MIMEDefang mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
