> Are you really sure you want the misery of running a mail server on a
> 486 with only 8 Mb of RAM?
8 Megs of ram is kind of minimal and downright stingy when it comes down to
it considering how cheap ram is, particularly for operating a linux kernel.
Not many user programs can run at the same time.
According to my pair of qmail servers, which are admitedly a couple powerful
HP LPR systems with gobs of RAM, qmail uses about 400K of system memory for
each program, and not enough CPU to note.
(TOP column display customized and irrelevant programs axed in the below
copy)
PID TSIZE DSIZE SIZE TRS RSS SHARE LIB %CPU %MEM COMMAND
1080 30 3968M 488 36 488 316 0 0.0 0.1 qmail-send
17354 17 3968M 456 24 456 380 0 0.0 0.1 qmail-remote
1081 3 3968M 428 8 428 348 0 0.0 0.1 splogger
1083 8 3968M 376 16 376 288 0 0.0 0.1 qmail-rspawn
1084 5 3968M 352 12 352 284 0 0.0 0.1 qmail-clean
1082 11 3968M 348 20 348 276 0 0.0 0.1 qmail-lspawn
1085 30 3968M 336 36 336 272 0 0.0 0.1 tcpserver
Given that it uses so little space, I think that assuming there is swap
space defined and you're running a minimal kernel, you could probably run 10
to 20 remote/local delivery sessions. Sure, it may not blast mail out like
a high end mailing list server, but it'll be more functional than, say,
SENDMAIL. ;P The limit is probably more memory vs. swap speed rather than
CPU power.
David
