Greg Moeller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm one of the admins of a largish Qmail installation (~60,000 mailboxes)
> and the hardware we're running it on it near the limit.
> (Sun Ultra 450, dual processor, A1000 storage array)
> The system is very IO bound, sometimes with a load average of 20-25.
> (although usually between 3-8)
>
> Now, we called Sun, asking about a high capacity disk solution, one that might
> help with the IO problems. (cache on the disk array to take care of all the
> fsyncs Qmail does) They told us that around 50k-60k
> mailboxes is about the limit of Qmail.
>
> Now, my question to all of you is how expandable is Qmail, and what's the best
> way to do it?
>
> We're looking to expand the system to 150,000-200,000 mailboxes.
Their answer was predictable - at least they have to try
and sell their SIMS.
I don't know about qmail - but as we have used a Sun U2
(two cpus) with 100,000 mailboxes for a short period of
time with sendmail, qmail should easily handle much more.
The problem - in this case - is Suns filesystem and qmails
file operations. You didn't mention the number of disks in
your A1000 - but maybe you should add some and spread the
load between them.
My suggestion, though, would be to dump the E450 and grab
a reasonable sized Intel box (maybe dual PII 500) with FreeBSD
on it. With FreeBSD, ffs and softupdates your i/o
headaches should be gone.
By
Töns
--
Linux. The dot in /.
