Re: [Exim] Exim performance on large mail systems

On Wed, 2 May 2001 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.

There are usually a lot of misconceptions about what "free memory" is on
a Unix based system. "free memory" is supposed to be small, otherwise
memory is being wasted. You should looking at swap activity instead.

> 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

Something that doesn't get recommended enough: link exim static. The
dynamic linker adds startup overhead everytime a new exim processed is
run. Do not be fooled by the larger size of the exim binary as this will
likely save memory. All modern Unix systems use a COW VM, so multiple
intances of the same executable don't use any more memory. This is
usually more efficient with a static binary.


Tom