System Bottlenecks

[Daniel Bird]

Errol Neal wrote:

> 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?

In the context of MailScanner I couldn't say for definate but I very 
much suspect so since SCSI will perform better than IDE on the OS side 
;-). Extra RAM will also do you a load of good.

64bit vs 32 bit, any performance gains there? Again, see above, but I'll 
leave that one for Julian.

>
> Linux vs Solaris? Anybody got any ideas?

Whatever you're comfortable with, although the upgrade process etc with 
Linux is far easier. We were originally using Ultra5's about 18 months 
ago bet changed to linux so we could use the rpm's etc. (made life for a 
couple of my admin's far easier ;-)

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

We do that volume on each of our mailhubs (3). They are little Celeron 
800's with 256Mb Ram and IDE disks. They each run MS/SA/DCC/Pyzor/Razor 
and 3 x virus scanners.
 I guess the question is how is your mail distributed? If you get a 
steady flow like we usually do, then this'd be OK.

Having said that, with the current troughs and peaks we're seeing from 
viri like SoBig etc, these little fella's are starting to strugle (and 
occasionally fall over becoase of the load), so we're upgrading to Dual 
PIII 1.4Ghz with 512Mb RAM and SCSI-3 disks. These are reletively cheap 
(< £1300 ext VAT) from Dell (accademic pricing) and will fly with our 
current load, and give us some room for growth.

>
>
> 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
>

-- 
____________________________________

Daniel Bird
Network and Systems Manager
Department Of Information Services
St. George's Hospital Medical School
Tooting
London SW17 0RE

P: +44 20 8725 2897
F: +44 20 8725 3583
E: dan at sghms.ac.uk
____________________________________

Everything is possible....except skiing through a revolving door





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