Mail Server recommendations

[Jim Durham]

On Thursday 28 April 2005 10:46 am, Steve Ames wrote:
> Which version of FreeBSD are you running?

Sorry...that's what happens when you get interrupted 4 times 
while trying to post 8-) !   I'm running 4.10. I have a couple 
5.x boxes, but I haven't moved the production servers to 5.x 
yet.

> 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? 

Load average was as high as 125. Lots of virus scanning and spam 
scanning processes.

> n 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.

That's an option I was considering. Like you say, sharing 
mailboxes for POP can be interesting.  One thing that I have 
considered also is having a 'plain vanilla' sendmail 
installation that folks POP from and do all the scanning on a 
set of load-balanced machines and then they just relay it to the 
POP machine. Something like that... 
>
> 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 the input...

-- 
Jim Durham