On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Joel Laing wrote to Daniel Senie:

> 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.

Agreed.  Mail system performance is more an issue of efficient disk I/O
than of processing power.  Even with 4.x you can fine tune Qpopper all you
want, but if you have an I/O bottleneck Qpopper will still perform poorly.
On my Solaris mail machine (9500 users) I moved /var/mail (mailboxes),
/var/spool (including Qpopper temp-drop-dir), and the rest of /var (most
logging) to separate disks on separate disk controllers.  This made a
tremendous improvement in performance.

It still doesn't address the problem of users with huge mailboxes.  They
will still slow everything down.

-- 
Chip Old (Francis E. Old)             E-Mail:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manager, BCPL Network Services        Phone:   410-887-6180
Manager, BCPL.NET Internet Services   FAX:     410-887-2091
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Towson, MD 21204  USA

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