[vchkpw] Suggestions for improving performance

[Jeff Koch]

Does anybody have any suggestion for improving the performance of a 
mailserver runnning qmail/vpopmail/qmailadmin/qmail-scanner/spamassassin? 
We're using a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM and a 40GB SCSI drive. The operating 
system is a basic RH8.0 install with the ext3 journalling file system. 
We're handling about 50K messages/day and seem to exhausting the 
capabilities of the server. During peak periods CPU idle time reaches 0% 
and load averages will exceed 10.0

We've seen some recommendations ( 
http://people.redhat.com/alikins/system_tuning.html , for example) for 
changing hard disk and file system parameters mostly having to do with 
read/write caching and cache sizes and minumum delays before writing to 
disk but we have been afraid to try any of these for fear of making things 
worse.

We would welcome any suggestions or URL's that you could point to - 
particularly with respect to performance tuning that will work with qmail.

Thanks



Best Regards,

Jeff Koch