[Mimedefang] Estimate of maximum messages via MD

Stephen L Johnson stephen.johnson at arkansas.gov
Fri Mar 12 16:12:07 EST 2004


On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 14:46, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> I am involved with an OSS project that is in desperate need of a tool
> like MD. Traffic is heavy, say in the order of 100k messages per day.
> Does any one use MD to handle this load and what configuration is
> needed?
> 
> Please reply directly and I will summarize to the list.

We are planning a rollout that should be able to handle 500K message per
day on a server.

Dual P3 1.2 GHz, 4GB RAM, 4x36 GB drives for spool storage. The
Mimedefang work directory will be a 250MB ram disk. 

>From my experience on a couple of smaller scale MD servers (Dual P3
800Mhz w/ 512MB of RAM), the important thing is enough having enough
RAM. 
1) Having the MD work directory in RAM. Saves tons on disk I/O
2) Having enough RAM to enough MD slaves to handle the mail load. 

Moving the MD directory from hard disk to a RAM drive was the biggest
boost to throughput. The smaller servers went from straining  1.5
msg/second to being able to handle upwards of 3 msg/second. And there
are servers with 512MB of RAM. And they handle roughly 20,000 incoming
e-mail a day. They operating at an load average of .7 .

-- 
Stephen L Johnson                       stephen.johnson at mail.state.ar.us
Unix Systems Administrator              sjohnson at monsters.org
Department of Information Systems
State of Arkansas
501-682-4339



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