[Mimedefang] Server load

Edward Wildgoose Edward.Wildgoose at FRMHedge.com
Fri Oct 11 10:03:00 EDT 2002


Depends how high end you are talking, but a Compaq SmartRAID with battery backed cache will cache disk writes and guarantee eventual writes even in a power failure, hence you will get all the benefits of a ram disk with the write back guarantees of file system writes (ie if the power fails the queue files will still be there).  

These things cost about £1,000 though (easily a better buy than an extra £1,000 worth of SCSI disks though!).  Load them up with as much RAM as they can eat and watch things start to fly...

-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Mueller [mailto:dmuell at gmx.net]
Sent: 11 October 2002 14:39
To: mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com
Subject: Re: [Mimedefang] Server load


On Fre, 11 Okt 2002, David F. Skoll wrote:

> > Replace ext3 by reiser. Reiser is a lot faster during creating and deleting 
> > small files, which is what mimedefang is most of the time doing. 
> Nick Christenson, in "Sendmail Performance Tuning" (Addison-Wesley),
> ran tests and found ext3 to be significantly faster than Reiser.

(aren't books about computer software always too old when they're printed?)

> often coalesce the create/delete journal entries into essentially a
> no-op.  If you do not quickly delete the files, then ext3 is not so
> good.

This is what more recent reiserfs does as well. Of course when you keep 
running old software you won't get the speedup. 

Anyway, I think this is becoming slightly offtopic..

I do agree that putting it on a RAM disk is the best thing, as long as the 
spool dir is not growing beyond certain limits. But sometimes bigger mails 
stuck in the spool directory, so they will fill up the RAM disc, destroying 
the small performance benefit you got. 


-- 
Dirk (received 400 mails today)
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