Email is a highly disk-bound activity. 8M emails per day including spam- and virus-filtering is no joke.
Back at mozcom before we were only doing 1M emails per day and we had like 8 machines for that (albeit single-processor Athlons). Personally I think the traditional SMTP infrastructure like Postfix is antiquated. Too dependent on disk. The mbox format is antiquated too... even if you use Courier-style or maildirs, the fact is delivering a mail requires a sync to the disk. So you still are disk-bound. For spam- and virus-filtering, you will definitely be CPU-bound. Try getting a quad-core Kentsfield with lots of sockets. Or the HP DL585, that's a good box. Four dual-core Opterons. Or better yet the Sun Fire X4300, EIGHT dual-core Opterons. I've had such a problem before, you are right the queues get very very long. I would try to fix the disk issue first. Then throw more CPU at the problem. The future is with devices like Cisco's IronPort. I understand there are open-source counterparts as well. These things handle 50K simultaneous connections on very modest hardware. Well worth checking out. On 9/20/07, jon robles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > actually the postfix are just for relaying mails to two separate systems. It > just actually serves as relay with rbl enabled using spamhaus and spamcop. I > already have 5 mchines in place but a traffic of 5.5M (with rbl enabled) or > more causes hellish queues. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
