On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 12:36:15PM +0800, Michael Boman wrote:
> I've seen someone post a question like this but didnt get a decent answer.
>
> I am looking into hosting a mailservice that will handle around 1-3
> million SMTP transactions per day. What kind of hardware do I need to
> manage that?
As always, it depends.
Are these inbound or outbound transactions. Inbound and the concommitant
local delivery is usually a lot harder on a system than outbound.
I've seen a single Pentium class server with FreeBSD and 256M deliver
around 1million outbound mails per day.
I've also seen an inbound system that consisted of 2 front-end ultras
delivering to a NetApp and that was needed for something trivial like
100K inbound per day.
> I also wonder if there could be a change of the queue dir so it could
> be shared, as then any of the mailservers in the mailcluster can take
> the queued file and send it, and not only the one that recived it in
> the first place.
queues cannot be shared for at least two reasons. Firstly qmail-send
et al assume they have a lock on the queue for their own purposes and
secondly the structure of the queue is such that it cannot easily be
shared across a network using, eg, NFS.
You will need to have separate queues that are load-balanced in
some way. There are also NVRAM disks to consider as potential
queue disks with awesome performance, but I've not seen those
used on qmail.
Regards.
