System Bottlenecks

[Errol Neal]

Hi all,

My company has been using MailScanner for some time now and have been
really pleased. Our primary platform for deployment is Solaris 9 on Sparc.
We are going to be deploying several new severs and are pricing out the
hardware for them. Since we depend on these systems and want them to be
as efficient as possible, we want to target possible bottlenecks in a
MailScanner system and put the capital there as opposed to just throwing
money at
the system.

Right now what we are looking at is deploying a 2.4 Pentium IV system with
IDE disks and 512MB of RAM. I personally think we should invest the money
in the Disk IO and even go with Pentium III's but my employer is not so
convinced. Of course everyone knows that SCSI is faster than standard IDE
dieks,
however is that increase in performance noticable on a MailScanner system?
Is the performance on a P4 that much better than performance on a PIII? Since
I do not have systems of this nature to test with I am turning to users of
this software to help me invest my budget wisely to produce the best system
I can.

SCSI vs IDE, is the difference that noticeable?
64bit vs 32 bit, any performance gains there?
Linux vs Solaris? Anybody got any ideas?


PS our daily volume of mail passing through our MailScanners is somewhere
in the neighborhood of 15-20K

Thank you in advance,


Regards,

Errol U. Neal

Errol Neal, Systems/Network Administrator
eneal at enhtech.com
Enhanced Technologies Inc.
http://www.enhtech.com
703-924-0301 or 800-368-3249
703-924-0302 Fax