Something else you might want to consider. Instead of one horribly fast
machine why not buy two machines and run them in a load balancing/failure
environment. You'll have the fault tolerance and performance as well.
Our original production environment took about 2 seconds per message to process
through our system (postfix, sa 2.63 w/most of the major rulesets and Vexira
a/v scanner) unless it is rather large. About 3 seconds a message when it is
concurrently processing multiple messages. When we had 256mb's of ram we would
see a few messages in the queue. Upgrading to 512mb's seemed to help a lot.
The production environment (which was retired not to long ago) was a set of
Toshiba 7100s (PIII, 450's with 10gb ide drives ATA 66 at best).
Our current environment is a set of servers running linux-ha using an internal
shared NFS partition. Only one machine is active but the NFS stores the SA
rules, virus definitions and mail queues. It is configured in such a way that
if the primary machine fails then the secondary will startup and take over the
queue. The new machines are P4 2.4 (non-hyperthreading) with 1gb ram, 40gb ata
133 primary drives. I think the total cost per machine was around $450 when we
bought them. Since the implementation we have only seen a queue once and that
was because it was a listserver that was screwed up (listserver admin was a
hotmail user the hotmail account was full so each bounce generate a bounce
generating a boumce, etc...) Even with the bounce SA was processing about 10
incoming messages per second (12k messages in about 15 minutes). during this
event we had a ~500 messages in the queue. Setting a postfix DROP rule stopped
the problem and the mailq cleared in ~3 minutes (with the exception of outgoing
which was bandwidth issue). Most of the slowness was because the desintation
servers couldn't handle the load that the mailspoolers were sending them. This
server also handles all of the outgoing traffic as well.
We have a similar configuration at another clients site that also works great.
-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Schuldt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 3/11/2004 1:41 PM
To: 'Federico Petronio'; 'SATalk list'
Cc:
Subject: RE: Hardware requirements SA
So that works down to a little less than 1 per second (3000ph / 50pm /
.83ps )?
CPU is more than adequate, I'd use SATA raid with raptor (10k) drives
(overkill but at least use 7200rpm/8mb edition ata) but you need more
ram
than 256mb if you multithread your SA. RAM is cheap right now I'd drop
in
512m of ECC ram so you can run 5 threads at once. If you want extreme
drop
it in using 2*256m ECC chips on a spread-spectrum memory board (nforce).
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Federico Petronio [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 2:43 PM
> To: SATalk list
> Subject: Hardware requirements SA
>
> Hi all... I would like to know if is there any document about hardware
> requirements for SA+Postfix.
>
> My organization receives about 3000 mails per hour on peek hours and I
> am not sure about what kind of hardware is needed.
>
> Currently the Postfix is running on a Sun Netra T1 but that computer
> also provides other services so I will set up a new box for SA (just
> like a "SPAM Firewall") between the real firewall and the Sun box.
>
> Do you think a AMD 2Ghz with 256Mb of RAM and IDE HD could do the
work?
>
> --
> Federico Petronio
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
