On Sep 10, 2005, at 5:47 PM, David F. Skoll wrote:
John Rudd wrote:
Hm. Well, maybe not. After adjusting that to 20 and 15, that's not
really helping.
We'd have to see some log messages to figure out why there's an
overload,
if in fact load is the issue.
The errors all pretty much looked like this one:
Sep 10 09:13:49 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu mimedefang-multiplexor[18967]: [ID
760071 mail.warning] No free slaves
Sep 10 09:13:49 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu mimedefang[18981]: [ID 847421
mail.error] Error from multiplexor: error: No free slaves
Sep 10 09:13:49 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu sendmail[19122]: [ID 801593
mail.info] j8AGCBci019122: Milter: data, reject=451 4.3.2 Please try
again later
That was with 10 slaves.
After I increased the number of slaves:
Sep 10 10:04:56 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu mimedefang-multiplexor[25403]: [ID
760071 mail.warning] No free slaves
Sep 10 10:04:56 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu mimedefang[25416]: [ID 847421
mail.error] Error from multiplexor: error: No free slaves
Sep 10 10:04:56 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu sendmail[25615]: [ID 801593
mail.info] j8AH3aYw025615: Milter: data, reject=451 4.3.2 Please try
again later
So, looks like it's that I don't have enough load capacity to have
enough slaves running to keep up with my message flow. On this
hardware.
I'm thinking it might be that we run our front line mail servers on
tiny/hold hardware (sunblade 150's and sunfire v100's, 2 of each, and
so
far I had only installed this on one of the sunblades).
Yep; that's pretty old hardware. As much as I love Sun, the sad fact
is that commodity Intel hardware running Linux or FreeBSD beats the
pants off SPARC hardware, at a fraction of the price.
Yeah. But then we get into conflicts here about platforms.
If we switch away from being an "almost all Sun/Sparc shop", our boss
wants to go with Linux (and, even within Linux, he wants to go with a
Sun solution -- I think mostly for support contract reasons, which has
to apply to more than just our mail servers, it has to go all the way
across our datacenter). My peer and I (the mail admins) want to go
with FreeBSD or OS X.
(and, it's not even that our boss is anti-OSX ... it's what he uses on
his desktop ... but he also recognizes that most of the rest of our
sysadmin group (incl. the non-mail admins) don't know OSX specifics ...
most of them don't know *BSD, either ... so it's hard to come up with
good arguments there)
So, we stay in a Solaris/Sparc holding pattern for now. But the
v210/v240 boxes are actually pretty nice. But, yeah, $/Hz is still
better on Intel. Or even PPC.
I wouldn't mind Linux so much if it wasn't such a moving target ...
while it's not as fragile as windows, it seems like you need to do as
much, if not more, patching and rebuilding on it in order to keep up
with what's current ... and you almost have to do that if you want to
remain compatible with any new features you need to implement. If it
were as easy as OSX ("click this button to see what updates are out
there, check which ones you want, click update, sometimes you have to
reboot"), that wouldn't be such a problem. Though, I hear that
recently a util has come out for various linuxes that is almost that
easy, for keeping things fresh and up-to-date. "Yum" or something?
(and, of course, FreeBSD isn't much better on this front ... thus OSX:
it's unix, it's bsd, it's easy to admin, what more could I want?)
On the other front, while I hear its memory manager and network (NFS in
particular) code are getting more solid, for server work, I'm still
gun-shy about the Linuxes I have used in comparison to FreeBSD for
server stability.
(the last time I mentioned linux, I was very tongue in cheek about it,
but now you see what my real concerns are)
What's your daily mail volume?
We get around 150k messages/day, not including messages we reject
through SBL+XBL (about 126k) or connections blocked through our
greet-pause. And, that's during the school year (those numbers are
specifically the month of May). Saturday morning should have been
light and easy for our mail load.
_______________________________________________
Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com
MIMEDefang mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
