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

Sven Willenberger sven at dmv.com
Wed Jun 23 19:17:46 PDT 2004



Joe Rhett wrote:

>>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.
> 
>  
> I would use RAID 0+1 or just plain RAID 0 since these should be
> cookie-cutter.
> 

I agree that a basic RAID may be desirable. We have a series of dual 
Xeon 2.4GHz with 1-2Gig RAM processing maybe 1/2 million pieces of email 
a day. These machines in particular do spamassassin and run in parallel 
(6 machines behind a load balancer). During mail bombs the machines show 
signs of sweating under the perl load and there is the recurring issus 
of either softupdates causing backtraces or some other memory paging 
event causing them - again only under the severest of loads. We do not 
use a RAID solution on those so using a simple strip may help avoid the 
situation we are seeing (5.2.1-Release-P8). We also use FreeBSD on our 
primary MX machines (again a load-balanced series of 3 machines) and 
these are not running any perl processes - simply sendmail with 
extensive access lists. These machines run flawlessly and combined 
handle some 2 million+ emails a day.

Sven


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list