> 24000 total users on a Pentium III 850MHz with 768 MB of RAM (not sure
> how many are active though...at least a couple thousand).
By volume I meant how many emails per hour. Number of users is largely
irrelevant.
> Upon activating this system, the load average of the machine has increased
> from 1-2 to 10! I suspect most of the time is being spent compiling the
> perl script and connecting to the MySQL database, though. If I switch to
If you're doing this per delivery, I'm not surprised. But it should be
easy to measure for sure with vmstat/top/acct, etc.
> fastforward (or if I rewrite the script in C, and use a persistent
> database connection handle somehow, maybe by storing it in an flock'd
> file) maybe the load average will drop back down to normal.
Maintaining a persistent connection across multiple local deliveries
is possible with some skull-hackery and a cooperating peer process,
but it's not easy, it's not possible using flock and it does raise the
issue of multiple deliveries using the same connection at the same
instant.
Tell us more about the deliveries? How many per hour, what is your
concurrencylocal? Are the deliveries keeping up? An unadulterated
snapshot of your qmail log would tell us a lot.
At this stage, periodic rebuilding of a fastforward file sure sounds
easiest - perhaps triggered by database changes.
Regards.
