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

[Randal, Phil]

I'm not sure what the minimum is, but our main mx box is a quad core
Dell 2950, 4GB RAM, running MailScanner / SA 3.2.3, MailWatch, ClamAV,
McAfee uvscan, FuzzyOCR, milter-greylist.

Yesterday it handled 165,000 emails, of which 91% were rejected at the
MTA level.

Load average tends to be around 1.2, peaking at 2.5.

Cheers,

Phil

--
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info 
> [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf 
> Of Edward Prendergast
> Sent: 14 November 2007 16:16
> To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
> Subject: Minimum hardware capacity for 35k e-mail scans/day
> 
> 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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