On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, NADASI Peter wrote: >i'd like to install postfix on a brand new linux box. >what kind of machine do you recommend? >in average 300MB mails/day is our usage. >is Celeron400 with 128MB RAM enough? >thanks
My Thinkpad has a Celeron 400 with 192M of RAM and a 10G IDE drive. As someone mentioned already email is IO bound, but also depends on having a reasonable amount of RAM (enough to cache everything in the queue for best performance). For my Thinkpad the 10G IDE drive is the most relevant issue (it's not fast by any standards). Also 192M isn't a lot of RAM. According to a quick run of Postal http://www.coker.com.au/ my SMTP benchmark program, my laptop is capable of receiving 20G of email per day through SMTP and sending it to email clients through POP. If I had a RAID-10 array with 4 IDE hard drives in a desktop Celeron 400 machine with 192M of RAM I'm sure I could do 40G per day at least. 300M is 12.5M per hour. That is the equivalent of a single high-speed modem sending email all day. Really it's an insignificant amount of email. I suggest using two IDE hard drives in a software-RAID-1 configuration for this. Two IDE drives will probably be cheaper than a single SCSI drive, but will be faster, and easier to work with. For those people who recommend SCSI based on reliability, I have seen more data lost through SCSI mis-termination than all other sources combined. I have seen million-dollar machines shipped from the manufacturer with stuffed SCSI termination. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
