Re: Qmail throughput
[snip] Their is *always* a "bottleneck" in every test. A bottleneck is absolutely normal. In our line of work, it is typically a cpu or or disk bottleneck, depending on the nature of the program involved. [snip] You have to learn to use your systems performance monitering tools AND how to interpret their reports. different system shave different tools. SYSV UNIX has the sar command, Linux has top, vmstat, and others. -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: mail volume
Modern OS's also don't know things like drive geometry. Good caching disk controllers do a better job of optimizing disk I/O. We've always seen major improvements in disk I/O with DPT caching controllers over just adding RAM to Linux. The OS has less 'dirty' buffers to track and worry about as well. If you're not going to stripe multiple volumes, why do you need a RAID controller? Any decent OS these days with a UBC will cache as much data as possible, so I would not expect too much more performance from a single drive, and a modern OS. FreeBSD with softupdates would probably work just peachy, with 98% of the performance, and less cost. On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Cris Daniluk wrote: Thank you for all the invaluable input. Personally I have a great deal of Linux/freebsd/qmail experience, though my qmail knowledge is quite limited to the extent of volume email such as this. Linux I think is the forerunner because I will not be dealing with the project after it is setup and therefore ease of administration is important. I have to throw in one more question, albeit somewhat off topic, it has definite relevance. We're going to put in a raid controller with a hell of a cache in it (64 mb probably). My question then is, what type of disk configuration would you propose we need? Space needs are virtually nonexistant, the machines sole purpose will be mail. Probably 100 mb for the system itself and then the rest will be for the queue. I'd figure a raid controller with 64mb cache and a 4.5 gb Cheetah would do the job. Do you feel that striping and multiple drives would be valuable? Also, our pipe is not going to be a bottleneck--everything is set up on a 100mbit lan with a T3 connection to the Internet. The t3 runs directy to level3's backbone in DC which we are a few miles from, so there should be no significant or relevant latency. Thanks again, Cris Daniluk -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: Who can tell me how to speed up my qmail system?
Dear friends: Now, I am developing freemail system based on qmail. I test the qmail's efficiency as following step. My Machine is a 256MB Pentium II - 450 under FreeBSD 3.2 [snip] If you're using IDE drives switch to UW (Ultra Wide) SCSI as a minimum and you might want to look into caching scsi controllers like the dpt PM3334UW and add 64MB cache to the controller. You're probably not processor limited. We got hit by a spam relay (we were researching and preparing to add antispam to our mailer) and even with all the normal load, our mailer with a P-166 was processing about 10,000 emails/hour. What else is running on that system? -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: how to deal with mail over quota limit
We don't run hard quota's. We do charge for extra disk usage. If a customer goes way over we may contact them as excessive disk space in email is often a sign of a problem. The user may be getting mail bombed, the account might be hacked, etc. If the problem is not the user's fault or does not seem intentional and gets corrected quickly, we waive the charges. What is the normal policy for handling email that goes over a users quota? Is the mail normally bounced back to the sender, just dropped or something else? I'm looking at adding user quota's to vchkpw, which uses a single /etc/passwd user for all pop mail accounts. Ken Jones Inter7 -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
vacation progam
I've been reading the manpages for qmail and either I've missed something simple or done something stupid, I can'tget the vacation program to work. my .qmail file is: ./Maildir/ |/usr/local/bin/vacation multics messages keep getting delivered over and over again and no vacation message is sent out. I've setup the .vacation.msg file and run vacation -I to init things. -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: Unique situation?
My normal thoughts would be for ETRN or UUCP. UUCP is specifically designed as a dialup mail/news exchange protocal. I'm not as famalier with how qmail would do this. There's a network 'mycom.com' which is a LAN disconnected from the = Internet. We would like to have a modem on the RedHat Linux + qmail = 1.03 server dialup an ISP or our consultancy's mail server (also RedHat = 5.2 + qmail 1.03) directly and exchange mail (queued email from = mycom.com and Internet email queued on our server) two times a day. Our = server has the virtual host 'mycom.com.' The goal is to allow the users = of mycom.com to send and receive Internet email, but only have the = Linux server connect twice a day. How would this be done? Could it be = done using serialmail? Regards, Eric Ess -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: Something a little interesting...
THere is a rebuttal of the test at: http://www.linux-hw.com/~eric/mindcraft.html NOTE: We've been doing for years one of the things they couldn't, using a raid controller with SMP. http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4rhlinux.html Not really related to email, but, I found it interesting how this company makes a claim that has been proven wrong millions of times, NT is NOT faster then Linux. I think the report is bogus. Reid Sutherland Network Administrator ISYS Technology Inc. http://www.isys.ca Fingerprint: 1683 001F A573 B6DF A074 0C96 DBE0 A070 28BE EEA5 -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: Suggestions for Mailing Lists
Wizvax supports mailling lists via majordomo. price depends on volume but is usually in the $5/100 subscribers/month range. email [EMAIL PROTECTED] for more information, not the list. I want to setup a mailing list. The current limitation I have is, I do not have a dedicated connection. Are there any low cost services to setup a mailing list? Thank you in advance. Subba Rao [EMAIL PROTECTED] == Disclaimer - I question and speak for myself. -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: qmail speed
Things that may improve things is to look at caching/high speed scsi controllers, such as the DPT 3334UW and the icp-vortex controllers. The DPT takes up to 64MB/controller and the icp-vortex up to 128MB/controller. We're using 2 DPT 3334UW's on our news machine (40GB spool) at this time and it's handling a T1 worth of feed without problems on 128MB RAM and an AMD K6-450 (usually runs 95% idle). It only slow down when doing an expire. Made a new machine to send out mailings. PII 450 with 1GB of RAM. I will try the "no fsync" way of doing things today. Its Friday and a mailing needs to go out. Preliminary tests show that "no fsync" seems to work so we'll see what the real life throughput improvement will be. Next experiment will be to run multiple independent copies of qmail where each copy has its own queue on a 60MByte RAMdisk. In theory this should result in up to 255*10 concurrent connections to the outside world. If neither gets over 100K deliveries per hour then I'll have to write my own "gattling gun" SMTP delivery thingy and just feed messages to qmail that have problems. Results will be reported back to the list. Dirk On Fri, Apr 09, 1999 at 11:07:31AM -0400, Dave Sill wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I need to find a way of doing 100K/hour. Ideally with one machine. I vaguely seems to recall that the author of qmail was claiming something like 100K/hour performance? I can't find anything like on the web page. The closest claims are: Efficient: On a Pentium under BSD/OS, qmail can easily sustain 20 local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered to mailboxes in a real test! SPEED---qmail blasts through mailing lists two orders of magnitude faster than sendmail. For example, each message on the qmail mailing list is delivered to more than 1000 hosts around the world in just 76 seconds. Scheduling: I sent a message to 8192 ``trash'' recipients on my home machine. All the deliveries were done in a mere 78 seconds---a rate of over 9 million deliveries a day! When you're sending messages, how many qmail-remotes are running? About 90-130. 255 if I stop delivery for a little while and then restart it. To me that means that the machine can send faster then I can get the messages into the queue. That's what it sounds like. So you either need to speed up the existing process via h/w or s/w changes, or modify the injection process. If you have money to throw at it, a solid state disk for the queue would help a lot. Moving the queue to a tmpfs or removing fsync() calls, as others have suggested, should help. Maybe you should hack up a customized version of qmail-queue that would inject your messages faster--perhaps while qmail is stopped. -Dave -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: qmail and imap (was folders)
Instead of seting .qmail to ./Maildir/ set it to ./Mailbox and qmail will store mail in mbox format in the users home directory. ok :-) I got an IMAP server from wu. It has its own pop3 server (as well as imapd) but it requires mbox format. Has anyone looked at getting an imap server that wants mbox format to talk to qmail's Maildir format? I think Maildir is just about to die here as a good idea but a bit of a blind alley unless I can solve the folders v Maildir problem now. I haven't tried cyrus smtp server yet ... Thankee :-) Alastair. -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
Re: badmailfrom question
On Wed, Feb 24, 1999 at 02:57:19AM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: are the messages from the addresses in /var/qmail/control/badmailfrom automatically bounced or do they just go to /dev/null? The sender is rejected at the SMTP level. The sender says: MAIL FROM:[EMAIL PROTECTED] and qmail-smtpd responds: 553 sorry, your envelope sender is in my badmailfrom list (#5.7.1) End of story. Is there anyway to have qmail use badmailfrom on the from line in the header? The spammers are forging the envelopes so the envelopes are pretty useless these days for filtering. (I've always referred to the "From " line as the envelope sender and called the "From:" line in the header the header from line.) -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
need some spam/relay help
We've been trying to stop relay raping and UCE in general through our system and so far, badmailfrom, rcpthosts, tcp-wrappers with /etc/hosts.deny seems to be almost completely useless or block our own users from sending/receiving email. I am a techie, but I've been doing managment/finance/etc so my tech side is very rusty. I'm looking at the following options: 1) Converting back to sendmail, is there information on how to do this or any conversion program to convert backwards but keep the maildir format? No flames please, we converted to qmail solely due to security problems with sendmail 3 years ago, sendmail seems to have finally gotten the bugs out. The performace enhancement was nice, I've seen the spam relayers shove 10K+ emails/hour through us and I'd like to stop that. 2) Is there anyway to have qmail check for certain text strings in either the headers and/or entire message and reject a message based on the header content, ie, alot of spam says things like From: some [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3) Can qmail be setup so we use a machine with sendmail as the spam filter and then have it pass the mail to qmail for deliver? 4) Other suggestions? One of the complications we have is we're running a couple hundred or so virtual domains and some of the users are not local to our network, they connect via aol.com, earthlink.net, etc. -- Richard Shetron [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the Meaning of Life? There is no meaning, It's just a consequence of complex carbon based chemistry; don't worry about it The Super 76, "Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy", Las Vegas Strip.
