>> -----Original Message----- >> I'm considering FreeBSD as an alternative, but I was wondering what >> people think of FreeBSD as a platform for Postfix. It's obviously not >> as easy to maintain as Ubuntu, but it does have a reputation for >> stability. Any thoughts, recommendations or experiences would be >> appreciated.
I used to run a mail server cluster with postfix, amavisd-new, spamassassin, clam-av, policyd and mysql for an ISP a few years back. Serving around 80000 accounts gave them a reliable load, and over time as I replaced hardware I tried several different major Linux distros (f.e. Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware) and FreeBSD, to find what worked best. I found they all performed roughly equal, except for the Red Hat that at the time suffered from the UTF-8 bug-or-what-ever in perl, which mostly affected amavisd-new/spamassassin performance, with FreeBSD being at least as good as the Linuxes. The biggest differences were in ease of setup though. Since I compiled all the above applications from source It was by far easiest to have it done on FreeBSD, since everything needed was available in their ports system with all dependencies sorting out themselves without me having to worry about it or spend the day searching for and downloading what was missing. All the hundreds or so perl modules comes to mind, again all dependencies automatically solved, and I don't think I ever had a single compile error with them on FreeBSD. First Linux runner up was Slackware (maybe not the most obvious candidate...), with the other Linuxes being about equally more grumpy to set up. Now, this was over two years ago, so things might be more or less different now, and I'm maybe not up to date anymore, simply since I now just go with FreeBSD for mail servers. If you're just using pre-complied packages this might be of lesser interest to you, but you can absolutely rely on FreeBSD for stability and performance. And I'm actually a Linux guy... -- //maccall
