Looking for some
pointers on sizing a machine to run Spam Assassin on. This server will be
protecting 2 mail servers, one receives an average of 6 million messages a
month, the other around a million. The send side is around the same but I'm
assuming those number don't need to be considered for sizing an anti-spam
server. I guess, that's if only inbound email is scanned and not outbound. The
average hourly comes to about 173,000 messages, however there are hills and
valleys throughout the day.
My current thinking
is a 2 CPU machine, either 2.2 GHZ Intel or 1.06 GHZ Sparc, that's expandable to
4 CPU's if necessary. 4 GB of RAM and some fast (10K RPM) SCSI drives on a
dedicated RAID controller.
On the same subject,
I'm still trying to decice between Solaris and Linux for this machine. I don't
want to start a religious war on this topic, however which would be the better
performer for SA? I'd imagine that'd depend on the Perl deployed and how spamd
is compiled as well.
Thought and comments
welcome,
Darren
Young
Senior UNIX
Administrator
University of
Chicago
Graduate School of
Business
Voice:
773-702-0331
