[IMail Forum] Hammer Time

[Dan Frazer]

Looking to get some advice from you expert types. I have a few mail servers running Imail 6 (until 7 is stable) and I'm running into problems where the servers can't keep up with the load on them. When this happens CPU usage is maxxed out and SMTP, POP, IMAP and WebMessaging start to suffer. The main times that this happens is when someone sends a list through the server. Weather it is a list of 200 or 2000 it seems to push the servers over the edge and services start to fail.   I'm running Dual PIII-550's, Windows 2000, 512MB Ram and ATA100 Hard Drive, 1,000 virtual domains with up to 250 accounts. Average is around 20 accounts per domain. Typical mail server pushes out around 100-120GB's of bandwidth per month.   I will be upgrading these to Dual 1Ghz shortly and could put up to 2GB's of RAM, don't know if that would help. Also looking at IDE Raid (SCSI is out of the question)   -I would really like to offload all list and mass emailing to another server, but don't know if this is a possibility. Any ideas suggestions? -I am thinking of putting in a second hard drive for the spool, but hard drive doesn't seem to be the bottleneck, CPU usage does. Then again, if the messages get sent faster because of a faster hard drive then there would be less CPU usage. Memory usage hovers around 125MB's. -Can the load be offloaded by using a Gateway? or even put up a gateway and send on second tries only to just ease the load a little. -How many concurrent SMTP executables do you setup in the registry?  We are setup as a 100.   Any advise or help would be mucho appreciated.   Thanks,   Dan