Glen Mehn wrote:
> Jeffrey Wheat wrote:
>
>> Hello all, I would like to get a few opinions for building my next
>> mail server. I am presently running a dual processor, PIII-833
>> with 1.5G RAM and 3ware disk controller running FreeBSD. I am noticing
>> a performance issue when trying to run sopie/spamassassin together.
>> The problem is that perl consumes most of the cpu while spamassassin
>> is enabled, thus driving the system load to well over 16.5. With just
>> sophie running, the load stays around 0.5 - 1.0. The server needs to be
>> able to handle around 350,000 mails a day, running Exim, Courier IMAP,
>> Sophie and SpamAssassin.
>>
>> I am considering a quad Intel PIII 700 XEON or a dual Intel P-4 2G
>> system with 2G - 4G of RAM. Can anyone with a similar mail load or
>> greater share their experiences?
>>
>> Many thanks in advance,
>>
>>
> I think that there are some serious performance issues in SA, this from
> an acquaintance who got *very* deep into the code.
>
> You might consider running a separate box (if rack space permits) to do
> SA and sophos. exim's only bottleneck will be i/o. You might also check
> with the SA list, as that's where your problem seems to be localised.
>
>
<followup>
Also, if SA is multithreaded, you could be running into a performance
bottleneck (I don't really know SA very well), but FBSD RELENG_4 and
older (basically, everything but bleeding-edge RELENG_5 stuff, including
-STABLE and -RELEASE) have a somewhat primitive threading model in the
kernel. You could be running into OS limitations, rather than hardware
limitations. I wouldn't think that your hardware would be much of a
bottleneck, as you describe, except, possibly, the i/o-- you don't note
what RAID level you're running, for instance: with heavy writes, if
you're running RAID-5, you might be able to put in one of 3ware's new
'optimised for RAID5' 7x50 (as opposed to the 7x10) cards... But you may
want to look at running another OS, or at least testing (with all your
spare time) if that'd do the trick. I know it *can* be a problem for mysql.
<caveat> I'm not anti-freebsd. Love it. Use it. Also use debian
gnu/linux. </caveat>
don't know if openbsd/netbsd would be of help.
</followup>
