On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 02:29:06PM -0500, Austad, Jay wrote:
> I already have Mandrake Linux 7.0 and 7.1 running on multiple Dell boxes
> with no trouble, some of them took work to get going, but it runs well. I
> have a few Crystal PC's here also that I may use instead, dual PIII 550's
> with 512MB ram and 9 or 18GB 10000rpm drives. I'll probably use these for
> testing.
I agree with the earlier poster that more spindles for your queue
(c/- raid) is a good thing in general.
> The bulk of the messages will be the same content to many rcpt's. However,
> once in awhile we'll have 100,000 different messages go out to 100,000
> different people.
>
> Since the QMQP support under mini-qmail doesn't load balance, can I feed it
> a hostname with multiple dns entries (round-robin dns)? Or better yet, how
> easy would it be to modify the qmail code to just load balance between them?
The manpage for qmail-qmqpc tells us that they have to be IP addresses
in qmqpservers so a RR DNS won't help. If all of the messages are generated
on one machine, then I'd be inclined to go for a much simpler solution
than modifying qmail. I'd have an instance of qmail for each outbound
server with the appropriate qmqpservers entry, then have your queue
insertion script do a round-robin itself by simply cycling thru
the qmail-inject command associated with each instance.
for instance in 1 2 3 4 5
do
getnext_message_details()
/var/qmail{$instance}/bin/qmail-inject currentmessage .... details
done
Or some such.
Alternatively, if you have money to burn, maybe a layer four switch
with load-balancing skills.
Mark.
>
> Jay
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 2:09 PM
> To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
> Subject: Re: questions about performance and setup
>
>
> > Here's what I need to know:
> >
> > 1. How well does qmail take advantage of multiple processors? How much
>
> Indreectly, quite well as it forks many processes, thus if the OS takes
> good advantage of your CPUs, then qmail inherits that advantage.
>
> > memory and disk will I need? (we're at 50 million messages per month now,
>
> Are these message unique per target address or the same. If unique, your
> requirements are vastly different and very queue/disk intensive. If they
> are the same and you take advantage or VERP support on qmail, then
> your load will mainly be sending related which will benefit from
> more memory, multiple instances, etc.
>
> > 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)
>
> The qmqp support doesn't load balance. It simply takes the first one
> it can connect to.
>
> > 4. Can I easily make qmail run an external script for each bounced mail?
>
> Absolutely.
>
> > 5. Anything else I should know?
>
> That all hinges on whether your emails are unique for each recipient or
> not. Or more importantly, the average number of recipients per unique
> email.
>
>
> Regards.
