Throughput

[Greg Matthews]

On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 12:50 +0000, Wayne wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> 
> Im getting a throughput of around 35-40k messages per day max
> The server is a dual p3 600Mhz with 1gig RAM
> Max Children is set as 14..
> Running on Fedora Core 2 with postfix and clamav for antivirus
> 
> Does this sound about right? 

sounds ok to me. there are various performance tweaks you can try to
squeeze a bit more out of the machine. I went through this myself a few
months ago, but it was a change in the way sendmail was configured that
meant I could reject far more at the MTA which let me continue to use my
original hardware. 

To be honest, I wouldnt expect much more performance from this machine
and I'd want quite a bit in reserve to get me over "humps" in demand or
give me some leeway during a DoS.

> Its barley keeping up with loads
> And sometimes falls behind..
> Load averages are always between 3-7
> Do I need a new server or is there some way I can get more out of this one
> with current hardware?

The best way to get more out the hardware is to deny more at the MTA,
therefore doing less actual filtering. For my setup I use one dynamic
block list, and milter-ahead for mailbox checking. With this
configuration I was able to weather a namespace attack recently when one
relay received approximately 1 million hits by midday. There are one or
two other blocks at the MTA but these two account for the majority of
dropped connections.

G

> 
> Thanks,
>  Wayne

-- 
Greg Matthews           01491 692445
Head of UNIX/Linux, iTSS Wallingford

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