I am using it as a passthru to my two on campus mail servers that have
the mail accounts for staff/faculty/students.  That is one of the
reasons that I picked the Scott Henderson guide to build my system
around so I wouldn't have to migrate all the accounts to it.  I am going
to add some more memory for general principle to keep it from having to
kick into the swap file.  Once administration likes what it is doing, I
will probably be given the money to put it on a system with more
processor and memory.

Ron

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Ron Nutter                          [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Network Manager
Information Technology Services                        (502)863-7002
Georgetown College                                     
Georgetown, KY                                            40324-1696
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-----Original Message-----
From: Kris Deugau [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 11:33 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Questions about SA


"Ronald I. Nutter" wrote:
> Also, what is suggested for hardware to run it on ?  I will be dealing

> with 1500 faculty/staff/students.  I have it on a 400 mhz pentium with

> 32 megs of ram.  I know I will need to add more memory before going to

> production but wasn't sure about the processor.

*cough* *splutter*

You're going to need a new box, unless you're expecting **VERY** low
per-user email volume.  A P2/400 won't break a sweat just doing SMTP and
POP3 service for thousands of accounts;  doing content filtering such as
SA on the same number of accounts pushes your processing requirements up
by something not far short of an order of magnitude.

I've got a P3/866/512M system with ~300 accounts, processing ~100K
messages/week- and while it's still got some headroom, it occasionally
bogs down if there's a spike in traffic.  It had been a P2/450, which
was OK if the previous system in the relay chain (don't ask) kept a
fairly steady serialized stream of mail coming... but if the flow
increased even a little, processing bogged down and mail backed up.

On the conservative side, say each user receives 20 pieces of mail each
week.  That's 30K messages per week.

But those accounts are going to start seeing spam, on the order of a
minimum of ~10 spams/day, after a few months.  That's another 70
messages/week/account - 105K messages.

And that's a *very* low spam volume.  Many accounts will probably see
50-100 spams daily within about 6 months - ~1M messages/week.  Quite a
few will probably see up to 200/day.  And a few will probably manage to
sign up for enough dodgy mailing lists to get their address far enough
out to see 300+ spams/day.  :P  Ugh.

For spamfiltering 1500 accounts, on a single box, I wouldn't go with
anything less than a dual P3/800/512M;  given memory prices these days
I'd probably push that up to a gig.  A fast disk system is also helpful.

-kgd
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