Mail Server recommendations

[Steve Ames]

Which version of FreeBSD are you running? Are you using 5.X to
take full advantage of both processors? To get the 'quantum'
upgrade a single faster machine is the way to go. Have you done
any profiling to see where the current bottleneck is? Is it I/O,
CPU cycles, network? In many cases it would make sense to put in
another box to distribute the network/CPU load but that comes with
increased storage complexity (getting all machines to write to a
common filesystem)... but given that spamassassin and clamav are
CPU and memory intensive I'd think that was a solid tradeoff. For
the cost of buying one BIG machine you could get 2-3 of the size
you have now and distribute the load.

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 10:32:33AM -0400, Jim Durham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We currently have a dual-1.8 Xeon box with 2gb ram and Raid-1 
> 160mhz SCSI's running sendmail/procmail/spamassassin and clamav.
> 
> Our place is growing, adding users and so, we need a bigger, 
> faster box.
> 
> Question:  Currently the box mentioned is a Dell PowerEdge 2650.  
> We like to deal with Dell, but it's not absolutely "written in 
> stone" that I do so.  I bought a 2650 because we got one to run 
> a Windows server and I booted FreeBSD on it to see what it would 
> make of the PERC3 Raid and all that and it was just fine. The 
> 2650 just 'loves' FreeBSD, so we bought one and its worked well, 
> but we need more performance now. What bigger, faster box would 
> make a significant jump in speed and capacity runs FreeBSD well?
> 
> I can get a 2850 with 3gb processors, 320mhz SCSIs and add more 
> RAM, but I'm not sure that would give us a quantum-leap in 
> performance.
> 
> -- Thanks for any suggestions..
> 
> Jim Durham
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