by LOEWENTHAL Simon-2 <http://old.nabble.com/user/UserProfile.jtp?user=747235> Oct 03, 2011; 11:08amHi there:I have to set-up a few low power SA boxes. Currently I'm used to using Intel Xeon 2.6Ghz with 16Gb of memory, but these proposed boxes are small. I won't buy one unless I know it can do the job. I know the figures below are tiny, but I don't know the Intel Atoms and what they can really do.# of active Email addresses (excluding Email aliases) : 80 # of messages (including rejected) appox 3,500 daily running : Debian/ SA 3.3.1 and spamass-milter (with MTA postfix, clamav-milter). hardware: http://soekris.eu/shop/net6501_en/ 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom E660 (1 core, 2 threads) 1024Mb RAM Transcend mSATA SSD 32Gb MLC Cheers for any commentary.
This year I decommissioned a box with a similar workload, but also running Apache and mySQL. It had a Celeron 700 and 256Mb of RAM. It was a little under-specified - it needed more RAM for peak loads, but as it was email, it just had to queue for a few seconds. It'd still be running but for one of the PATA drives - went flaky and replacements not readily available - and it was ~12 years old so owed me nothing.
For what it's worth, this was running FreeBSD, sendmail, postfix and dovecot (along with Apache/mySQL - which was pushing it). With just email and 1Gb of RAM you should be laughing. You could probably allocate half of it as a ramdisk for good effect. If you're using X.11, all bets are off!
You don't say what you're doing *with* the mail. If it's going into mailboxes with an IMAP server, you'll need more disk unless the users are well trained - or NFS?
Don't be scared of the Atom - I use them all the time. My concern is low energy, low maintenance (little heat = no fan). The boards I use take about <1A @ 12V (with 2.5" drives) and can realistically be run off Solar and a car battery.
Just remember Bayesian filtering is what eats CPU, if it comes to optimisation. But you're talking about a couple of emails a minute, which is nothing - I'd estimate they'd take between two and ten seconds each, even with Bayesian filtering - don't even thing of worrying until they hit fifteen a minute.
Regards, Frank. -- -------------- Sent from my Cray XT5
