[Mimedefang] What hardware are you running?

Ben Kamen bkamen at benjammin.net
Tue Sep 2 11:34:01 EDT 2003


My setup's a joke.

I think I get like 6000 messages a month and about 5500 of them are spam.

I have 15 users. (laffin)
I run 4 slaves. (laffin harder)

Although I will say, if you want speed, Sun is not the box to get. I'm 
not trying to poke fun, I'm being serious. Solaris has been mocked as 
the MS of Unix. Ok hardware, ok Software - standard by defacto... 
everyone has used it.  You might want to look into something faster like 
IBM or HP as they're CPU's used to rate a notch better than UltraSparcs. 
And nowadays, you could build a farm of Linux systems (SCO vs IBM aside) 
with all that stuff collecting dust in the closet that no one wants to 
run anymore.

In anycase, Sun is what you have - and in my past experience, I worked 
for a company that used to build tiff rendering systems of all types - 
and running them pegged was just another day at the bit-churning factory.

So some might ask the question: 17-20%? What are you saving the other 
80% for? hehehe... Although, I'm not sure if 20% is supposed to be only 
MIMEdefang traffic or ??? you didn't list that.


  -Ben



Shepet, Mike wrote:

> We have two sendmail servers running Solaris acting as our relays for an
> internal MS Exchange environment.  Both boxes are Sun Ultra2s with over 1GB
> of memory, one has two 296MHz cpus while the other is single cpu.  In your
> experience, would this hardware be sufficient to add MIMEDefang +
> SpamAssassin to the mix?  After testing, we found that 15 concurrent slaves
> yielded a five minute load average of 17-20 on the dual cpu box.  Even
> though it was responsive at the command prompt, does that sound a bit high?
> Lowering the maximum number slaves produced a lot more of the "no free
> slaves, try again later" errors.  We average 35-40K emails a day between the
> two of them.






More information about the MIMEDefang mailing list