Just to follow this up, I'm now running with '-q1m' and queue_run_max set to
200 and everything is great, the only other thing I'd recommend is setting
log_level = 4 to get rid of all the queue runner debugging messages that
quickly fill up log files if you're running queue runners on huge mail
queues every minute.
Nice to see exim outperforming our previous sendmail setup :)
Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: Theo Schlossnagle [
mailto:jesus@omniti.com]
Sent: 02 May 2001 18:32
To: EXIMUsers@???
Cc: exim-users@???
Subject: Re: [Exim] Exim performance on large mail systems
Our machines are similar in configuration except that they are intel
machines (dual proc/1 GB). We deliver about 1.5 million message/day on
any given machine. But, we don't push mail between 11am and 8pm (only
8pm to 11am).
We run exim in -bd -q1m mode. Limit the queue runner queue_run_max to
about 50 and let it run. External to that we have process that monitors
available resources on the system and forks a queue runner if and only
if the resources are sufficient. It seems to be very stable -- we have
been running this way for about 1 year.
I figure if we ran all day long, we would probably end up delivering
about 3 million messages per day per machine -- though it is very nice
to have a maintenance window :-) The limiting factors for our machines
are disk I/O and context switching. Your Sun box should do better on
the context switching from and probably has more on chip cache which
will help there too. As for disk I/O, there are a million different
solutions. Most of them cost money though...
In light of the fact that one of our relay machines costs ~ $2000 US,
the most economical solution is to buy another machine and share the
work load that way. :-)
On Wednesday, May 2, 2001, at 05:32 AM, EXIMUsers@??? wrote:
> One of our dedicated exim mail servers, a dual cpu sun box with 1GB ram,
> currently sends about 10GB a day outbound. Recently this machine has
> peaked
> at over 800 exim processes, pushing free memory down to about 15MB.
> Are there any particular configuration changes that can help with
> performance on exim systems pushing a lot of mail and starting up a lot
> of
> proccesses? I was considering just setting queue_only, launching exim
> with
> "-bd -q1m" and then limiting the number of processes with
> queue_run_max..
> Are there any possible problems I should be aware of with this
> solution, or
> does anyone else with similar usage levels have any tricks they can
> pass on
> for optimizing the mail delivery process?
--
Theo Schlossnagle
1024D/82844984/95FD 30F1 489E 4613 F22E 491A 7E88 364C 8284 4984
2047R/33131B65/71 F7 95 64 49 76 5D BA 3D 90 B9 9F BE 27 24 E7
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