5.2.1 with 40000 virus scanned mails / day on Dell hardware?(Hardware suggestions)

Freddie Cash fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca
Wed Jun 23 09:14:06 PDT 2004


> I need to setup 3 servers on different locations as mail gateway with
> about 40k mail per day each. the servers runs MailScanner, Clamav and
> Spamassassin. The customer has Dell hardware and only buys Dell
> hardware.

> Has anybody experience with Dell servers which runs under FreeBSD. I
> think about systems with Dual Xeon 3.0, 4 GB Ram and fast SCSI Hot
> Plug Raid 5 which should be strong enough to handle that amount of
> mails forwarding them to a Notes server.

Wow!  That's overkill, and then some.  :)  I don't have direct
experience with Dell servers (we're actively replacing those with
white-box systems), but me experience with a mail gateways follows:

We're running a dual-AthlonMP 2600+ (1.8 GHz) system with 3.5 GB DDR
RAM, and 3x200 GB WD IDE drives in RAID 5 acting as mail gateway. 
Software includes FreeBSD 5.2.1-p8, Postfix, Amavisd-new,
SpamAssassin, and ClamAV.

This server handles virus / spam filtering for 15 domains, and about
25,000 unique mail accounts (15,000 staff, 10,000 students, give or
take a bit).  We get a hell of a lot of messages per day (although I
haven't tracked the exact number or trends yet, but could extrapolate
around the 50,000 mark), and I've yet to see the server CPU load get
above 5 - 10 % and the system load rarely goes above 2.0.  The mail
queue rarely gets above 200 messages, and most of those are bounce
messages to non-existent or uncooperative servers.  (This server is
also being used to test Courier-IMAP and Cyrus-IMAP with SquirrelMail,
so there's the odd spike during testing, but everyday use never taxes
the system).

We're actually planning on replacing this with a non-RAID system with
a single AthlonXP or Athlon64 so we can use this server as part of the
back-end of the new mail system coming in next month.

-- 
Freddie Cash, CCNT CCLP        Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73             (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca


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