Re: [Exim] Performance: Solaris and Linux

Steven Dossett wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm new to the list and this is my first post ;) I'm working on a
> deployment
> of exim as the standard mail exchangers for our company. We have a bit
> of
> "big iron" (well, modest iron) serving customers today without mail
> exchanger
> functionality split off into multiple hosts. In considering exim for
> splitting out this task.

aah - sounds very familiar - this is a thing we had 6 months ago at our
place :-)

> However, my testing indicates that I can get much better performance
> running Linux. The performance difference I'm seeing in this price range
> is startling.

yes yes and yes again - this matches perfectly with our experience (we
also tested with some of our (existing) V120 and E4(2)20 gear - with
similiar (frustrating) results ...

> At 8 postal processes and above I saw the Netra pretty much bottom out
> as far
> as available idle CPU cycles. This allowed me to again see the sporadic
> mix of
> slow answer times. On the other hand the Dell, even at 32 postal
> processes,
> was still approximately 50% idle.

and now weight in further possible extension to this mailsystem like
spam or virusfiltering which really needs a lot of CPU-cyles - in our
experience you can hardly beat one of the modern/latest X86-CPUs in this
tasks, they have just to many M(G)Hz to burn in comparison to a
(technically maybe better) Sparc-CPU.

> Is
> anyone out there running Exim 4.24 on Linux in a similar configuration?
> How
> has it performed for you? Do you have any general Exim on Linux
> suggestions
> that I should keep in mind before moving forward with a Dell/Linux
> solution?

We are on Debian Linux/IBM xSeries(2GB RAM, 2Ghz XEON with 15K SCSI
disks) here and I think I can assure you we will never look back to our
older Sun installations (except for a good laugh about the performance
or so *g*)




Stefan