Stephen Gran wrote:
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.
Hi,
We are running a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1 gig of ram as our inbound pre-filtering mail server. It runs qmail with qmail-scanner and clamd and uses spamc to process them through SpamAssassin running on a second machine.
It's average email processing (not smtp connections as a lot are blocked via a few rbl's, badmailfrom entries and the like) is 75 messages per minute with bursts to over 175 per minute. Load averages stay around 0.8 and I have seen it go as high as 2.x or 3.x for small periods of time.
The SpamAssassin machine is actually just going into production now and it is a 3 Ghz P4 with 1.5 gigs of memory. We ran it last night during our peak user period and it processed everything we threw at it (the above mail server plus another mail server) with load averages hovering around 0.45.
All of our machines run FreeBSD or Linux Slackware. These two happen to be running FreeBSD 4.8.
HTH,
Rick
