Minimum hardware capacity for 35k e-mail scans/day

Edward Prendergast edward.prendergast at netring.co.uk
Wed Nov 14 16:16:16 GMT 2007


Hi,

We are reaching capacity with our current hardware setup. Our current
machine is a Dual Xeon 2.40GHz + 2g RAM workhorse which runs all services
required for web hosting (MySQL, Apache, Exim + Courier + MailScanner +
MailWatch + SpamAssassin + ClamAV, named) but are looking to separate this
out as the machine can no longer handle the load inflicted by all these
services.

By 5pm we've usually scanned 35,000 mails, 10% of that legitimate. We reject
at MTA based on greet-pause and invalid recipients. We have tried to reduce
the amount of users with catch-alls to the absolute minimum. We went on a
Mail optimisation overhaul a few months ago during which time MailScanner's
working area was switched to tempfs and we started using compiled rules. 

We archive mails for 7 days and keep 20 days worth of mail. 

The only bottleneck on our current setup appears to be CPU - vmstat looks
like this:
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id
wa
 2  3 311500 801316  37144  97396    1    0     3     1    0     0 15  5 70
10

With bayes on, the load average hikes up to around 10, 11 or higher
depending on time of day. Without bayes the load usually sits around 5/6. 

At present the hardware budget is fairly constricted so I'm looking to find
out what minimum level of hardware would be required to run:

MailScanner 
MTA in gateway mode (forwarding scanned mail to existing server)
MailWatch (MySQL DB stored elsewhere)
SpamAssasin, compiled rules, bayes

Any advice from the vast pool of MailScanner experience would be greatly
appreciated.

Regards,
Edward


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