Hey Jay,
I don't know much about setting that type of thing up in
qmail, but I would like to give you some ideas on the
hardware. I'm not sure how much load qmail would generate
in a scenario like that, but you may want to consider
Solaris x86 for the superior SMP performance. Also, you should
know what you're getting into on the Dell boxes if you choose
to run linux. I've got a Dell PE2400 dual that runs linux
and you're going to be at the mercy of Dell and Adaptec on
when you upgrade your kernel because they have some sorry
proprietary drivers for their RAID controllers that are
tailored to a specific kernel version and redhat sub-revision.
If you can put up with that, then Redhat Linux/Qmail on a
Dell runs very fast, I'm happy with mine. But at the same
time, I'm sitting on a kernel with a known suid exploit
hoping Dell will release newer drivers soon... It is much
nicer running Linux on an older Dell server of mine that has
an AMI MegaRaid card with drivers built into the kernel.
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: Austad, Jay
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Sent: 7/14/00 2:18 PM
Subject: questions about performance and setup
I've been given the task of setting up our own "blaster" for sending
out emails of our financial news and charts to our subscribers. We
outsource this right now, and it's abysmally expensive. Basically,
we want 3 boxes (or so) that run in parallel and blast out the emails,
about 50 million per month, but the subscription rate is growing
rapidly each month. It needs to handle bounced mail by dumping the
addresses into a file for later retrieval so they can be removed
from the database, or by running an external script for each bounced
address.
I'm looking at getting 3 dell dual PIII 750's, with a 18 or 36GB
10000rpm disk, and 512M or 1G of mem each. Each will run Linux or
BSD.
Here's what I need to know:
1. How well does qmail take advantage of multiple processors? How
much memory and disk will I need? (we're at 50 million messages per
month now, and we only send out monday-friday, so that's over 2
million messages per day, and it's only going up)
2. How many messages per day would one estimate that each of these
servers could do?
3. I read about mini-qmail and how it's about 100 times faster blasting
out email to QMQP servers. Since you can specify multiple QMQP
servers, if I have a fourth machine running mini-qmail and managing
the actual mailing list, can I add the other 3 as QMQP servers and
have it load balance between all 3 for sending out mail? (this way
I could add more servers easily if I needed to)
4. Can I easily make qmail run an external script for each bounced
mail?
5. Anything else I should know?
Thanks.
----------
Jay Austad
Network Administrator
CBS Marketwatch
612.817.1271
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://cbs.marketwatch.com
http://www.bigcharts.com
