I think the biggest improvement you can make is to put the temp-drop-dir on a separate drive. This will help lessen the I/O bottleneck. Also, use fast drives. If possible, stripe multiple drives for performance on both the spool file system, and the tmp-drop-dir file system. Mind you, I've not really played with the 4.x possibilities, but the above greatly improved performance for my 3.x setup.
Daniel Senie wrote: > At 04:26 PM 4/3/02, Mohamed M. Abbas wrote: > >> On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Daniel Senie wrote: >> >> > At 03:30 PM 4/3/02, Mohamed M. Abbas wrote: >> > >Hello All, >> > > >> > >I run a combination of sendmail / qpopper setup for our email >> > >infrastructure. And we've been having more and more users ( 5000 >> users >> > >total ) start to leave their mail on the server. >> > >> > Time to institute a policy to sweep out the cruft. >> > > We have about 30 people >> > >who have in excess of 25 Megs of mail on the server. When anyone of >> > >those 30 users checks their email, the load on the system skyrockets >> > >through the roof. >> > >> > We run a utility that sweeps out mailboxes. Presently we have it >> delete >> > anything that's been in a mailbox for more than 30 days. Worked like a >> > champ, and much easier than trying to police our user base. >> > >> >> I thought about that. But I'm not sure if it's effective for a user base >> of 5000, where there is a trend to leave mail on the server. > > > My feeling is, it's quite practical. I have the sweeper running at > 3AM, when few are using the server. But even so, the load from the > sweeper is minimal. > > >> > > My question is this: Is QPopper or POP3 suited for >> > >situations where users leave their email on the server? >> > >> > Well, qpopper is an application, and POP3 is the protocol it >> implements. >> > You might want to rephrase your question. As for qpopper's >> performance in >> > such cases, there are several tunable parameters which you might >> want to >> > consider. Others have discussed these recently. I'll let others >> comment on >> > the best approaches and tradeoffs. >> >> > > And if it's not >> > >suited for such purpose, what protocol / software is? >> > >> > Your protocol choices are POP3 and IMAP. >> >> I guess I have to be more precise. Given the situation that I've >> described >> above, which protocol is more suited for it? > > > Well, IMAP is more complex to describe to users. That's the primary > reason we don't support it. Just not worth the support costs. > >> And if POP3 is suited, how do >> I go about to configure QPopper in such a way as not to produce load >> spikes every time someone who leaves his mail on ther server check >> his/her >> email. > > > This I'll leave to others. There's some material in the manual about > this, and some that folks have learned. > > >> Mohamed M. Abbas >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> System Administrator >> Longwood College > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Daniel Senie [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com > > > >
