RE: [Exim] minimum requirements

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Author: Doug Block
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: RE: [Exim] minimum requirements
    I have about 80 Courier Imap users on a 2000 AMD cpu with 512 meg
ram and I am runing Spamassassin with clamd and Maildirs (these are all
current versions) I am noticing that I am having a Higher CPU load per
connection then I did with my old exim box which is a p3 1.5 512 meg with
exim (4.10-1) and just courier-Imap (from 2002 unknow version) with user
mail boxes hitting 100meg -1 gig of mail. What would be a good way to
decrease the load which is spiking for on user to about 20% on a scsi raid
that is at 320 meg bus. I am planning on cutting very one over the new box
here in about a week so I can give spamassassin a change to learn thing with
the bayes option on. I plan to have about 1 gig of ram when it goes in to
production but the cpu load per user is starting to worry me. Should I have
gone for a dual Opteron (sorry don't remember the spelling) as I do have
about $800 USD left for in the budget for this project?

Doug Block

Chief Information Officer of Efast

http://www.efastfunding.com


-----Original Message-----
From: exim-users-admin@??? [mailto:exim-users-admin@exim.org] On Behalf
Of Alan J. Flavell
Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2004 7:46 AM
To: Exim users list
Subject: 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

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