Well, we don't run an enormous setup, but here's some stats on one of our
busiest servers:
400MHz Pentium II
256 MB RAM
RAID 5 on IBM UltraStar 7200RPM drives
RH Linux 6.2 with the latest kernel (2.2.16)
This box supports 4000 - 4500 SMTP and POP3 customers, with no signs of
slowing down. Now to be fair, it also does their web pages and a little bit
of RealAudio for them. Our traffic on this box is probably 25,000 - 30,000
messages a day. Fairly small by most counts.
Anyway, we had been on a 200MHz machine with sendmail and it was eating our
lunch. After we moved to this box in February, our load average was
generally between 0.00 and 0.10 if nobody was running Real Audio (the qmail
stuff was SO efficient!!). UNTIL...we were getting so pounded with spam I
decided to apply Nagy Balazs' patch that ensures that each incoming email
has a valid domain in it's return address, so it won't accept any mail that
it cannot bounce (since a lot of spam tends to come from things like
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) The added overhead of doing a DNS queries for email
has bumped up the system load a little. It now hovers between 0.00 and
0.15. :) Our customers are extremely pleased with our performance increase
since February. And recently they've been even more pleased since we've
eliminated 75% of the SPAM we used to get with this patch we applied.
One other note...when we made this move from sendmail to qmail in February,
in the 10 hours we were down for the switch, we had queued 2500 emails on
our backup MX (also a qmail box). We dequeued, and they were all delivered
in about 90 seconds. In April, we took over about 300 customers for a
smaller company near us, and decided to bring up a sendmail box and put them
on there for a couple weeks until we could merge them onto an established
server. During the move, we queued about 300 messages. qmail dequeued as
fast as sendmail could take them, but sendmail still hadn't accepted all the
messages after 90 MINUTES. That sold me. No more sendmail for me.
I absolutely LOVE qmail. We are in the process of converting EVERY sendmail
box we have over to qmail, and have never regretted moving to qmail at all.
I have detailed instructions for the rest of our admin crew, and once a
RedHat box is installed, we can get qmail up and running on it in about 30
minutes, and that's SMTP and POP3, fully configured, fully ready to accept
mail. 30 MINUTES!! We run nothing out of inetd (all tcpserver, including
our POP3), and run the latest supervise around everything. We don't do any
of the big TODO patches...we're not big enough to warrant those yet, I don't
think.
We run everything with Maildir. The advice I got when I was first starting
to work with qmail was "you'll be buying me beers a year from now if you use
Maildir". I owe that man a KEG. :)
So...print this email out. Give it to your potential customers! I would
ask them to read the next line carefully:
If you switch to qmail, you will NEVER regret it. EVER.
:)
I'd be happy to answer any questions this email might bring up!
-D
- Original Message -
From: "Eric Cox" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2000 2:48 AM
Subject: Psuedo-benchmarks?
Hi All!
Okay, here's a chance for all of you guys that run huge sites
to brag a little. I run several smallish qmail installations
and am trying to convince a couple of larger MS-Centric ISPs
(that get ALOT of spam) to let me switch them over to qmail -
and increase my cash-flow in the process of course. :)
And I need a favor...
What I'm looking for are not really benchmarks; I realize the
futility of accurately benchmarking an MTA. But if I could
get a rough idea of how much volume a real-world qmail system
can handle on a given set of hardware, it would go a long way
toward making my case for qmail.
So, if you're so inclined, could you send me a message with
your basic setup (like CPU/Speed,RAM,OS,HDs,connection in/out),
approx. number of users, approx. volume of mail, and a rough
idea of how well the machine(s) are handling the volume, etc...
It's probably a good idea to refrain from cluttering up the
list with this kind of traffic, so you should send them
directly to me - if there's any demand for the data I can
post a synopsis to the list for all to enjoy.
Thanks very much in advance,
Eric
