Anyone running big SPARC boxes?

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Julian,
   I'm running MS 4.31.6, SA 2.63, razor 2.61, sophos 3.83, clamav 0.74
(both as perl modules) with sendmail 8.13.0 plus three RBLs on a Sun
V1280 with four 900 MHz cpus, 8 GB of ram, Solaris 9.  I do anywhere
from 20K to 50K messages per day (total, not delivered), depending on
campus life and incoming spam.  Students are gone right now so the load
is lighter.  I run a caching named (BIND 9.2.3) on the box to keep up
with DNS lookups.

  Define "full blast".  Our usual daytime "uptime" is between one and two.
If somebody like alumni relations is doing a mass-mail blast to parents
or alumni they can run the load up to 8-12 for short periods of time.
The busiest I have ever seen the system is when admissions will send out
"customized" email blurbs to prospective students, one message per prospect
for 20-30K messages.  This can keep the machine loaded for up to an hour,
with no real loss in service quality to the rest of campus.  During these
blasts, the backlog in mqueue.in can hit 300+ (my setting for
"Max Normal Queue Size", I think the default is too high), but it generally
disappears quickly.  This box hasn't had a problem keeping up with our
day-to-day traffic at all,  If it did, I would add more CPUs.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Julian Field wrote:

> Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 18:13:04 +0100
> From: Julian Field <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Anyone running big SPARC boxes?
>
> Is anyone running MailScanner with a virus scanner and SpamAssassin on 2 or
> 4-way (or bigger) modern SPARC systems?
>
> If so, what is your hardware configuration and how many messages per day
> can you process at full blast?
>
> Thanks folks.
> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support
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