On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Paul Hutchings moaned: > The box is a PII-350mhz with 256mb ram and a pair of mirrored 10k SCSI > drives on a hardware raid controller, things vary but the machine processes > around 12,000 emails a week. > > I don't know much about the best ways to evaluate performance under linux, > disk performance shouldn't be an issue, load averages show around 0.2-0.3, > but memory usage is always near the physical limit with around 60mb of swap > in use (this is going from top).
That's about 1.2 mails per minute: your config can easily stand up to that. As the load averages indicate, most of the time SA's not doing anything at all. On a modern Unix box, memory usage is *always* near the physical limit unless you've just rebooted or done something extreme with the explicit intent of pushing things out of cache. Free memory is wasted memory: It's better to use it for disk caching. It's also often good to push rarely-used data pages to swap (even though this incurs a disk write) and use the freed physical RAM for caching of heavily-used data (like, well, pieces of the Perl binary :) ). > I wouldn't say things are at all slow, mail takes only a few seconds to be > passed through the box, but for sake of a few $$ presumably more ram is a > sensible way to go? You will run short eventually, spam volumes soaring as they are, but for now you seem to be OK to me. -- `I agree that school is a learning environment, and learning to intimidate others -- aka "social skills" -- is part of that.' --- jabberwocky
