On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 05:22:57PM +0100, Olivier Bonvalet said:
> Hello,
>
> sorry for this "frequent" question, but I don't really found what I'm
> searching.
> So, we actually have 6 small servers (sempron 2.2Ghz, 512Mo RAM, 1 IDE HD)
> to send a newsletter once a week to about 400'000 members.
>
> We setup Exim 4.5 (Debian Sarge) on each of them, but can't send more than
> 280 emails per minute (less than 5 per second). It seems slow, no ?
>
> The spool dir is in a XFS or JFS partition (dependding of the server),
> and the
> hints database is in memory (tmpfs).
>
> Have I to set anything else to improve perf ? Does another hardware really
> improve this ?
You'll need to profile to figure out where yourbottleneck is,
unfortunately. It occurs to me that if 6 servers send 5 emails/second,
and the email is 5k, that's 150k/s, which is roughly the speed of a T1.
If I have guessed right, and you have a T1, then there's not much that
tweaking the server hardware will do.
There are several good tools to benchmark various parts of your hardware
out there, but the next thing besides bandwidth that occurs to me is
that IDE disks are fairly slow for a high throughput machine, and you
may be better off with SCSI disks at least, if not RAID'ed for better
throughput.
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