RamDisk

[Randy Herban]

Alas, I have never tried it either.  I was browsing the new MaximumPC and it
had a 4Gig PCI card just for this. (the site address is www.cenatek.com) and
that was what peaked my interest.
I checked each of the boxes in my cluster and none are using more than 4 gig
of space on /var so this would be ideal.


The beefiest box in my cluster is this:
AMD 1.3G
1G RAM
30G SCSI drive (not sure on speed)
RedHat 8.0
MS 4.05-3
Sendmail 8.12.5


Normally it uses near 900meg+ of ram (I think there might be a mem leak in
mailscanner, not 100% sure tho) and it handles mail very well.
I have noticed that when the incoming queue builds up past a certain point,
it just keeps on going and doesn't catch up.  I have cron scripts setup to
stop accepting mail once the mqueue.in hits 5000 and doesn't start accepting
until it drops below 4500.  For whatever reason, once I stop accepting
messages, the queue drops down several thousand even though I start
accepting mail again at 4500msgs.

This behavior is similar on my other 2 boxes, they are not as fast as this
so they seem to suffer a bit more.

Does anyone have any suggestions or tips for me ?
I know I will have to try the new version of mailscanner for sure.

Randy

-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK]
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 11:21 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: RamDisk


At 15:40 16/12/2002, you wrote:
>I had an idea earlier about possibly using some sort of ramdisk to
>handle the mailscanning and mailq items.
>
>Have any tests on this type of setup been ran or am I the visionary in
>this area.
>
>I know my mail servers ( I have a cluster of 3 right now ) handle a LOT
>of mail and I'm looking for ways to help the load and to deliver mail
>quicker.
>
>Any ideas?

I'm expecting a *very fast* new server tomorrow, I have a load of speed
tests in mind for it, including this. What sort of ram disk are you
considering, tmpfs? I must confess I have never set up a ramdisk on a Linux
box, but I expect it's all pretty obvious.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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