Re: [Exim] RAM in mail server

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Tabor J. Wells wrote:

[ ... ]

> > My hard drive on my mail server is doing alot of access (slow seek time,
> > etc). I have 10,000 users on the 400Mhz Pentium II with 128MB ram. I am
> > wondering if my access is being slowed down by mail transfer, or from
> > swapping. how do I tell which?

[ ... ]

> Also I don't know how your disks are laid out, but I would strongly
> recommend putting I/O intensive directories (like your mail spool perhaps)
> and filesystems on their own disk.

If you have a single /var/mail (or whatever) with 10,000 mailboxes in it, then
this may also be your problem. Unix directories don't scale well to this sort
of size. You may want to consider splitting the mailboxes accross a directory
hierarchy e.g. /var/mail/A/B/login where A and B are different for succesive
login names. Exim has a string expansion function, hash, which may be useful
for deriving these from the login name.

Regards,

DHS
-- David Sheryn <D.H.Sheryn@???> Postmaster, Computing Services
-- City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB
-- Phone: (+44) 171 477 8000 Direct 0171 477 8196 Fax: 0171 477 8565