Hey Jeff, I don't have much info specific to your question, but I wanted to chime in here. I don't think you will find a lot of performance increase by using RAID for the queue, as data is read and written a LOT and Raid 0 (Mirroring) (correct me if I am wrong) usually only makes reads faster... We have found that most of the bottleneck on our mail server was spamd.
I have NOT setup a single toaster with RAID, but we implemented a modified version of Bill's ISP setup, and you may find some of our results interesting. This page: http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~gelb/castle_raid.html shows the results of some tests with hardware vs. software raid, and show that in most situations, the performance increase of hw vs. software RAID is small (unless it is a very expensive raid card). We have a 4 node mail cluser, where there are 4 boxes that run Bill's toaster, all of them store their mail on the same NFS server, which has Seven drives in a software Raid 5 Array. ALL of our cluster nodes are almost ALWAYS at 100% CPU (Except for a few hours each night when they finaly clear their queues completly and can rest a little). Here is the output of a current "top" top - 12:28:05 up 50 days, 16:30, 1 user, load average: 0.50, 1.15, 1.20 Tasks: 325 total, 1 running, 324 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 10.9% us, 1.7% sy, 0.0% ni, 62.6% id, 24.2% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.7% si Mem: 1035284k total, 1021516k used, 13768k free, 299584k buffers Swap: 2096472k total, 388k used, 2096084k free, 444052k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4237 mysql 15 0 139m 40m 4096 S 11.6 4.0 7008:38 mysqld 452 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 86:34.96 md0_raid5 22301 root 15 0 2088 1104 760 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.55 top 1 root 15 0 1692 552 472 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.61 init 2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:02.23 ksoftirqd/0 3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 events/0 5 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper 6 root 16 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread 50 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:37.66 kblockd/0 51 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid 181 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.48 ata/0 182 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux 183 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd 186 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd 188 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 kseriod 207 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kapmd 215 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 31:22.55 kswapd0 216 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0 362 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_0 363 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_1 364 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_2 365 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_3 379 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_4 380 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_5 387 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_6 388 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_7 405 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kpsmoused As you can see, the software raid (md0_raid5) takes almost no cpu power, and in fact, most of the cpu power goes to MySQL. You can also see that the "wa" percentage (which shows how much cpu time is spent waiting for io operations, frequently disk io), is pretty low. Joey On 9/6/07, Jeff Koch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Has anyone successfully setup Bill's toaster with SATA RAID? A year or two > ago we setup a toaster with a two drive 3ware IDE RAID mirroring setup and > the performance was awful. Maybe it was because we didn't have write > caching enabled on the RAID controller or should have tweaked the kernel > settings. > > I looked at Bill's proposed setup for an ISP but we're just trying to do > this for a single server setup. The only solution we've been able to come > up with in the past is to have a single small drive for booting, > /var/qmail > and /var/logs and run SATA RAID for /home/vpopmail and everything else. > But > we'd really like to have RAID running for the qmail queue since that's > what > beats the hell out of a hard disk. > > Any recommendations or experiences anyone? > > > > Best Regards, > > Jeff Koch > > -- --- http://www.joeynovak.com C) 803-409-9969 (Work Cell) W) 757-233-0834 "Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes." Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. --Bill Gates Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. --Bill Gates Cope with Life, go buy a slurpee! http://www.slurpee.com/games.html
