System capacity

[Vlad Mazek]

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Dave Filchak wrote:

> I just received my copy of the MailScanner book and was beginning to go
> through it and in the course of doing that, it mentions system
> configurations and some examples found on the MAQ. In looking at that I
> came across the following stats that sort of freaked me out.
>
> Hardware: 1 x P4-2.0Ghz, 1G RAM, 80G IDE
> Software: RHES 3, Sendmail 8.12.x, SA, razor, pyzor, dcc
> RBLs: MTA = spamcop, ordb, sbl-xbl.spamhaus
> Virus Scanners: ClamAVmodule SophosSAVI
> Volume: 150 messages/day
> Average Load: Around 2-4
>
> Hardware: 1 X Pentium, 200, 256 MB RAM, 4.3 SCSI HDD.
> Software: Red Hat 9, Postfix 2.0.16, Gateway mode - All Mail forwarded
> to Lotus Domino, Spamassassin, Pyzor, DCC, MailWatch, Vispan,
> Mailscanner-MRTG, Caching Named,
> RBLs: None in MTA, None in MailScanner, All in SpamAssassin
> Virus Scanners: ClamAV
> Volume: 1500 messages/day
>
> Now I have a  Pentium IV 2.6 GHz machine with a gig of ram and and
> pushing through about  750 to 1000 on average with some days going
> considerably higher, so this makes me worry a lot ;-(  Am I totally
> under powered here? I am
> using  a setup very similar to the first one except it is RH 9. I also
> find it odd that the second system can process more mail per day? Is it
> a typo?
>
> Dave
>
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I think you need to take all these "statistics" with a gran of salt,
especially when they pertain to the number of messages passed and the
system load.

The load on the system would depend on a number of hardware metrics
(CPU, hard drives, controllers), supporting software (quality of
drivers, quality of mail related things), tasks the system does (mail
server, web server), tuning of the hardware, software, mailscanner,
spamassassin and all the other options.

Anotherwords, two systems with identical hardware, identical software
and identical setup could have remarkably different loads just on the
size of messages they get. We have a over a hundred mailscanner systems
in our farm and about the best advice I can give you (if money is not a
big concern AND you are concerned about a low load and redundancy) is to
get multiple boxes instead of a single very-powerful one.

-Vlad Mazek

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