On Fri, 15 May 1998, Peter Chen wrote:
> We have a Sun Enterprise 5000 web server that sent several thousands of
> mail inquiries in a burst. I am afraid the Linux sendmail server might be
> swarmed. I personally saw that there were more than 2000 open sendmail
> sessions on the Sun server by doing a "ps -ef | grep sendmail | wc". Is
> this possible for Linux kernel 2.0.33/24 or the stock sendmail in RH5.0?
Somewhere under the /proc/sys directory, there are file-max and inode-max
"files" that hold the values for the maximum number of open files & open
inodes... You can just do something like
echo 8192 > /proc/sys/kernel/file-max
echo 8192 > /proc/sys/kernel/inode-max
And the limits will be adjusted on the fly.
> > How are your users getting their mail? Are they getting it from POP/IMAP
> > from this same server, or is this server just a big hub and delivering
> > their mail via SMTP directly to their personal machines? My guess is the
> > former. In that case, handling the POP requests will probably be more
> > trouble than the SMTP requests.
>
> Yes, you guessed it. All 4000+ mailboxes will be on the same server. Is
> this realistic for RH5.0? Can /var/spool/mail directory contain so many
> files (mailboxes)? If not, what is the best way to place the mailboxes?
I happen to help admin a mail server (Red Hat Linux 4.2) at a small
college, with almost 1200 mailboxes in one directory. There *shouldn't* be
any problems
> Is 2.0.34 released. I heard 2.0.29 is more stable then 2.0.30-33 under
> heavy load. Has 2.0.34 fixed the problem with 2.0.30-33?
2.0.34 hasn't been released yet (very close though). Get the latest 2.0.34
pre-patch - it's the stablest thing as far as I know. It has fixed some
tiny bugs
> What do you recommend, hardware or software raid? If hardware raid is
> recommended, which raid controller is best in terms of support and
> performance?
Software RAID has the potential to be faster, because it uses your main
CPU. BUT that's only if your main CPU is faster than the one on the
hardware RAID controller ;-)
I don't think Linux software RAID supports hot-swap right now, whereas
hardware RAID solutions often do, so there's another thing to think about.
> Yes, can't rule that out. So if both sendmail and POP/IMAP server are
> running, is 256MB sufficient? Or should I go for 512MB to play safe?
RAM is cheap, go for 512M and have a system that will spit all that mail
out in a flash ;-) If it's a choice between 256M & fast disks, or 512M &
slow disks, I would go for the 256M and fast disk drives, though.
-- Elliot
When I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather...
...not yelling and screaming like the people in the back of the
plane he was flying.
--
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