Hi, Thanks for your detailed reply.
As reliability is not of great importance (only the mail queue will be there and no critical system files), I'd go for speed and cheap price. The client doesn't have the huge wads of cash for the optimal system with scsi drives and 64M cache raid card :-/ So I guess if it comes down to the crunch, speed and cheap price is it. I'll also scratch the NFS idea since qmail wouldn't work well on it, and as you said, there wouldn't be much benefit if the other server has the same problems as well. Okay... the server right now is an AMD k6-2 500mhz 128M with 2 15G IBM drives. At this moment, it is really having trouble processing the mail queue. sh-2.05# qmail-qstat messages in queue: 297121 messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 72333 I checked the log and yesterday it sent about 1 million emails. Do you think that the above hardware configuration is performing at it's realistic limit? Sincerely, Jason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell Coker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Jason Lim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[email protected]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 3:42 AM Subject: Re: Finding the Bottleneck On Thursday 07 June 2001 20:14, Jason Lim wrote: > I agree with you... it seems more and more likely that the Disks are > the limiting factor here. > > I guess the next big thing to do would be to run some form of Raid > (software or hardware) for the mail queue. > > Does anyone know of a cheap but adequate raid hardware solution? The > one's I've seen seem to cost quite a bit. I know that the common cheap > ATA100 Raid cards available now (using the Highpoint HPT370) don't work > properly on Linux beacuse of the bad driver support. Anyone know of an > alternative? For RAID hardware there are three criteria you desire, reliability, low price, and speed. You can have at most two of them. There are a number of cheap hardware RAID solutions out there which would be quite OK for home use, but not for a server of the type you are considering. If you had several redundant servers with the same data then one of the cheap hardware RAID solutions might do well though. > Actually... do you think setting up a seperate box (connected via NFS) > PURELY for mail queue processing would help at all? Or would the > bottleneck then be shifted to NFS? If the NFS server has the same disk system then you will only make things worse. Anything you could do to give the NFS server better IO performance could more productively be done to the main server. Also many of the common Unix mail server programs are specifically designed to have the queue on a local file system with standard Unix semantics (Inode numbers etc). Qmail is one mail server that I have found to not work with it's queue on NFS, I haven't seriously tried any others. I've CC'd Brian May because he does a lot more NFS stuff with Debian than most people and he may be able to advise you. I suggest just getting 4 IDE disks and putting everything on a software RAID-10 apart from /boot (which must be RAID-1 for the boot loader to work). It'll get the most bang for the buck! -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
