New Server Specs?

[Steve Freegard]

Paul Hutchings wrote:
> My question is, broadly speaking which would be best to have more of, 
> CPU, ram, or disk subsystem?
> I'm looking at the cheapest HP/Sun/Dell servers which tend to be SATA 
> disks and slower dual-core CPUs but with plenty of memory slots.

As Martin mentioned - memory is one key piece, you need to have 1Gb per 
CPU core, then set Max Children to 5 * CPU Cores for optimum 
performance.  Any form of swapping/paging will quickly kill performance 
of MailScanner/SpamAssassin.

I also always recommend buying a *decent* RAID controller with 
battery-backed write-back cache as fast disk access is a requirement to 
cope with busy periods and future growth and.

Cheers,
Steve.