Anyone running big SPARC boxes?

[John Rudd]

Julian Field wrote:
>
> 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.


We do 120k-350k messages per day, depending upon time of year (we're a
university), day of the week (light on weekends) and other factors (new
spam/virus bomb? etc.).

Until recently, I had MailScanner running on 4 E280R's (through
communigate pro), but once my CGP scripts starting showing some
problems, I had to disable MailScanner on those machines.  I once
dropped a load equal to my entire daily mail feed on them (about 20k
messages, at about 5k per hour), for 4 hours straight (an internal mass
mailing to all users, sent directly to the CGP cluster, so it was being
scanned directly on the CGP cluster instead of my front-end machines).
The cluster didn't even notice the extra load, and the messages drained
through quite quickly ... though, there's a strong possability that
about 1% of them disappeared without notice (the script problem I
mentioned).  They're dual processor, maxed ram, dual disks that are
using sun's disk suite to mirror everything.  The actual work space for
mailscanner is/was mounted off of a blue-arc nfs file server.

(before you say "wouldn't it be faster to use a local disk?" ... no, it
wouldn't, that's how fast the blue-arc is; it has direct lan access with
1GB ethernet, and the networking and NFS logic are all done in hardware
instead of software; our database group has a blue-arc of their own, and
their massive campus oracle database is stored on their blue-arc, but
the database server is _CPU_ bound, not network/io bound) (plus, the
disk mirroring in disk suite probably helps that equation by slowing the
local disk IO, as well, but even before taking that into account, we
were pretty sure the blue-arc was going to win over local disk)


Our front end machines (the only ones doing scanning right now) are a
mix of SunBlade 150's and Sunfire v100's (2 of each).  Since CPU, 1.5 to
2 gig of ram, and dual internal disks that are mirrored with disk
suite.  Though, I'm not using the blue-arc for their work space ... hm,
maybe I should do that.  They sometimes get clogged up a little bit, but
most of the time their queues hover in the 100-600 range depending upon
the day.  Only when we get hammered with an internal mass mailing (thus
the reason I directed it to our CGP cluster, that one time, instead) or
a spam bomb from a viral spam-proxy in our resnet, do we see a serious
back-log of messages.



Right now I'm trying to get the front end machines upgraded to beefier
Suns, and hoping we can get some funding for a new blue-arc titan system
(not only is the networking and nfs code in hardware, but the filesystem
meta-data is stored in hardware as well).

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