[Mimedefang] RAM disk

[Jason Englander]

On Mon, 15 Apr 2002 dbruyne at uia.ua.ac.be wrote:

> Hi,
>
> in the announcement of MD 2.7, I found the following item :

David is the man for adding that.  I started to, then I got side
tracked for about a month ;-)  (and I can only hack c, I can't write it
<g>)

> Has anyone tried such a RAM disk for the spooling ? What was the result?

It helps lots on very high traffic machines.  Don't have to deal with the
disk I/O.

I still help out an ISP I used to work for, they have about 6k customers,
most are dialup, and right now all mail coming and going goes through one
box with MD.  Way back when the original amavis (uses external binaries
for everything) could just barely keep up, then every few days it would
get backed up to the point of no return.  amavis-perl was better,
but still got backed up, amavisd (milter) was still better, but MD +
multiplexor is doing great (and you get a nearly unlimited number of
other features with it).  The ramdisk is the clincher really.  If we
dump NAI's uvscan in favor of something like openantivirus'
scannerdaemon (but with MANY more virus signatures like NAI's or RAV),
it would probably fly through them like it was bored.  Even so, the load
average is 0.68 right now...  I think that box has a gig of ram and two
P3s (1Ghz I think).  The original MD installation had quarantine and
spool files going into the ramdisk, but of course if the box died all of
the qdirs are gone.

  Jason