Russell Coker wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: > > Email doesn't really need much processing, but does take > > surprisingly large amounts of disk space. > > Obviously such things differ depending on exactly who is > using the service and what they are doing. > > But my experience is that with modern disks a mail server > will run out of seek > performance before it runs out of space. > > [...] > > If a message delivery takes 10 disk writes (actually it > probably takes more > once you count writing to two files in the queue then writing > it to the spool > and deleting the queue files with lots of fsync() along the > way) then such a > machine can only deliver 13 messages per second. > > I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code > to not use > fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about > the reliability > issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry about).
Well, qmail is an I/O hog. We have a (small) list-server at a customer which was set up with qmail (w/ el-cheapo 20 GB IDE HDDs). Could only send at ~512 kbit. Then replaced qmail with postfix, now it saturates the customer's T1 without problems... >From my experience, you should use a hardware raid controller w/ (at least) 10000 UPM SCSI disks, and postfix+courier imap. CPU power should be no problem, it's seek I/O that matters. Just my 0.02 Euros Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
