New server request

[DAve]

Richard Frovarp wrote:
> DAve wrote:
>> Currently we get hit with 200k to 300k connections a day that hit an 
>> RBL. We see 15k to 25k pipeline attempts. We spam scan almost 50% of 
>> our mail and we Virus scan everything that comes in. We process 4gb of 
>> mail a day on two servers, total around 50k to 65k message we actually 
>> deliver. We process 16,908 whitelist and 14,348 blacklist entries from 
>> MailWatch.
>>
>> Mail delivery for our clients *INCLUDES* outbound scanning and 
>> filtering through my smtp servers (different hardware) and coming back 
>> in through my MailScanner servers.
>>
>> I can get that done in 5 minutes round trip time for a message. 90% of 
>> that time is spent in the MS server, queues, waiting for pickup, etc. 
>> I think that is pretty darned good.
>>
>> That is apparently not good enough. Every month or so I get told that 
>> mail delivery in incredibly slow and I need to look at the servers. I 
>> do, and every message I check takes around five minutes.
>>
>> I need a recommendation for the root'n toot'nist, rockem sockem, 
>> nuklear powered, rocket fuel fed servers money can buy. I want to push 
>> a batch of 30 messages through a full featured install of SA, Clamav, 
>> and local rulesets in less than 5 seconds. Tops. When my sales 
>> director hits send in his outlook, I want the message to deliver so 
>> fast his laptop jumps from his desk.
>>
>> I think I need striped SAS disks with 15k spindles, four CPUs, and 
>> 16gb of ram. I am open to realistic suggestions, though humor is still 
>> welcome. I intend to submit a quote this week.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> DAve
>>
> 
> I've got an old 2.66 GHz dual Xeon with 2 GB of RAM that pushes through 
> mail relatively well. Standard RAID 1 SCSI disks. Right now it's doing 
> batches of 2 in about 15 seconds. It handles about 4 GB of of traffic 
> and scans about 46 K a day. I would expect a dual quad core with the 
> requisite amount of RAM would be plenty. Network tests take a while 
> anyway, and there isn't much you can do to speed that up. I am running 
> greylist, greet pause, valid user lookup, and blacklists in sendmail to 
> reduce the load. I also have two other machines that see similar load.
> 

Not much different that the servers we currently run. We do not run RAID 
at the moment. Except I have two servers were you have one. Batches of 2 
take about 6 seconds, in the evening. During peak hours I get batches of 
10 that require anywhere from 60 to 190 seconds. I can go from 7 
messages waiting to 300 messages waiting in the blink of an eye. Though 
left to it's own, MS will chew through them just fine.

We also run greylisting (with client's whitelisted), greetpause (with 
our own network whitelisted), RBL (in MTA), caching DNS, and 
milter-ahead to the pop toasters.

DAve


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