Re: [Exim] minimum requirements

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Jan-Piet Mens wrote:

> On Sat Apr 24 2004 at 12:16:59 CEST, Christopher Baker wrote:
>
> > What are the minimum requirements for Exim? The machine in question will
> > process mail for about 60 users.
>
> With what volume of mail for those users?

I'm not sure that's the critical question. If the box ran exim and
nothing else, quite a low-powered box can handle a considerable amount
of mail.

I think a more critical question would be, do you plan to run
spamassassin or similar content-analysis tools? Do you plan to run
imap/imaps services on the same box, and if so, how many simultaneous
sessions do you expect? Do you plan to run a webmail service on the
same box? All of these will require memory resources, and some will
need nontrivial computing resources too. exim is the least of your
worries in such a situation, IMHO.

> Supposing each gets a couple dozen messages per day, without too
> many large attachments, I'd think an old '386 would do the job...
> Seriously. I've been running a gateway for 6000 users with 30k
> messages per day on a Pentium II with 256MB RAM, Redhat 6.0, the
> machine mainly being idle.

Indeed. One day, some time back, our server hardware failed: as an
emergency measure I dragged up a not-exactly-new desktop PC alongside,
plugged a SCSI card into the desktop's PCI bus, and booted-up the
server's SCSI filesystem on the desktop PC. And it ran without a
murmur. But that was before we introduced spamassassin: we might not
get off so lightly nowadays.

However, when the mail server occasionally _does_ get into
difficulties nowadays (high "load average", and sluggish user
response), the prime cause usually seems to be the memory requirements
of multiple imaps sessions, rather than the cpu requirements of spamd.

good luck