Fabio Sangiovanni wrote:

>I need to setup an environment made up of multiple MTAs to accept 
>incoming mail, in load balance configuration.
...
>2) x MTAs + 1 external policyd daemon (used by all MTAs) + 1 external db

I've gone with that option for my little cluster

>How will a single policyd daemon deal with the load of multiple 
>(let's say 5) high-traffic (>20.000 mail/day/mta) MTAs? Of course 
>I'll set the number of policyd concurrent threads accurately.

I had some performance issues to start with, but then I did a 
software update and a slightly newer MySQL server seemed to cure it. 
 From memory they related to the connection being lost between policy 
server and DB engine.

The next bottleneck I hit was with Postfix itself. Again from memory, 
but I think it seems to be limited to about 2 messages/second/thread* 
when calling the policy server. I did some stress tests and found 
that the backend policy server could keep up with multiple hosts, 
each running two threads, without having a particularly powerful host 
(can't really give specs, dedicated virtual machine for the backend 
policy server/DB running under Xen along with multiple other VMs). My 
target was to handle about 20k messages/day total, but heavily biased 
towards office hours and I wasn't worried about the backend being a 
problem.

* Actually, 2 recipients/second/thread. I was throwing large numbers 
of messages, each with large numbers of recipients, into the queue on 
multiple hosts.

It's easy to throw lots of requests at the policy server with 
something like netcat a short shell script to loop round lots of 
times. I just captured a query from the detailed logs and used that 
multiple times.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.
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