On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:44:30AM -0700, Wesley PA4WDH wrote:
>
> The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It seems a
> bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be email with an
> MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam filtering. The number of
> emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day or so, so i guess that won't
> be a problem. My main question would be if it's responsive enough to be
> usable. Does anyone have any experience with virtualisation on an atom ?

Excluding virtualization, it should be more than enough. I'm preparing a
small mail and web server for hosting which will take on much more traffic
than that. The only bottleneck I ran into was mutt loading my 200MB+ mbox
files, but compared to an opteron it's only a few seconds longer. (It's
actually mutt's pokey parsing; using my own custom mbox and MIME parser, I
can load and parse the file as fast as the disk can send it--less than 2s.)

FWIW, I'm using 2 20GB Intel SLC SSDs, one for /home and the other for /var.

Throwing virtualization into the mix, though, gives me pause. Even with
hardware vx instructions, virtual hosts still have a huge stack of software
to go through for simple things like disk I/O, and these paths execute a
lot. Like with mutt, there's not much overhead with the Atom to make up for
suboptimal code paths. If you're worried about security, I'd use OpenBSD or
Ubuntu (the former because unmaintained and unpatched it's still a hard
target to break, and the latter because Debian Apt takes most of the burden
out of maintenance.)

My guess is that it will be fine, but be prepared to ditch the virtual hosts
idea, and maybe think about SSDs.

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