New Server Specs?

Paul Hutchings paul.hutchings at mira.co.uk
Wed Apr 4 12:04:31 IST 2007


Thanks all.

I'm not desparate to do this on the cheap, but obviously I don't want to
be asking for company money for something that is massive, massive
overkill even allowing for future growth/changes etc.

Currently I'm running on an old Poweredge with a single 2.4ghz Xeon CPU
(single core with hyperthreading) with 1gb of RAM and a single 80gb ATA
drive (we want something that will be under warranty)

I'm running Spamassassin on incoming mail and ClamAV on all mail with no
OCR checks though this may be something I'll do in the future via
FuzzyOCR.

I'm no expert on Linux benchmarking but uptime shows "load average:
1.23, 1.43, 1.20".

I was looking at HP originally and then I looked at Sun and noticed
their X2100 appear to be very good VFM (and are SLES approved which
suggests I should be able to install OpenSuse "out the box").

Paul Hutchings
Network Administrator, MIRA Ltd.
Tel: 44 (0)24 7635 5378, Fax: 44 (0)24 7635 8378
mailto:paul.hutchings at mira.co.uk



-----Original Message-----
From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
[mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Steve
Freegard
Sent: 04 April 2007 11:44
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: Re: New Server Specs?

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.
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