What sort of mail volume (MB) are you talking about here? We handle about 8000 emails a day totalling around 600MB (those figures are fairly constant) on a single processor 2.4GHz P4 Xeon-based 1 GB RAM Dell 2650 mail gateway box running Fedora Core 1, Sendmail, MailScanner, MailWatch, mailscanner-mrtg, and virus scanning with both ClamAv and McAfee uvscan with a load average hovering around 0.2 (max in the last 24 hours was 0.7).
I'd hazard a guess that dual Xeon 3.2GHz processors would do the job for you at a much lower load average than you're experiencing now. Cheers, Phil --------------------------------------------- Phil Randal Network Engineer Herefordshire Council Hereford, UK > -----Original Message----- > From: Stephen Gran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 10 February 2004 14:56 > To: Spamassassin-Users > Subject: [OT] Specing out a new box > > > Hello all, > > I've been lurking here for a little while, and haven't seen > this kind of > thing come up, so I was curious if anyone has any suggestions > about it. > One of the companies we do backend work for has a very busy > mail server > - averages probably 50 messages/minute, with peak burst > periods of about > 100-110 messages/minute. Running spamc/spamd on that box resulted in > huge load averages (30-40 or more) at peak time, and loads of 15 or 16 > at normal time. > > We are in the process of revamping things, and will probably move to a > distributed spamd, but we are also thinking about replacing the mail > server itself. We need a little more juice to do other things like > running clamd and whatnot. I was just wondering what hardware other > people are using for this volume of email - ~75000 > emails/day, some days > more (especially when one of these worms pops up it's head). > Right now > it's running on an smp AMD K7 or so, but we're looking for suggestions > for upgrade. > > Thanks for any advice on this, > -- > > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ------------ > | Stephen Gran | Q: What looks like a cat, > flies like a | > | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bat, brays like a donkey, > and plays | > | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | like a monkey? A: Nothing. > | > > -------------------------------------------------------------- > ------------ >
