[Mimedefang] tmpfs queue directories

Justin listuser at numbnuts.net
Sat Mar 27 17:17:11 EST 2004


Howdy all.  I'm building a new mail system and have a question about the 
tmpfs sizing recommendation.  We're also evaluating Can-It Pro so I need 
to keep its needs in mind at the same time.

http://www.mimedefang.org/node.php?id=28

In that FAQ David recommends 2.5 to 3 times the max message size x the
maximum number of MD slaves.  Does this still hold true with the newest 
versions of MD?  That FAQ entry is almost a year old.

Also is it best to configure MD to have as many slaves available as I've
configured Sendmail to have?  If Sendmail has more than MD, does Sendmail
simply wait on MD to free up a slave or does Sendmail tempfail the
message?  We recently were on the receiving end of a massive spam flood.  
This happened a few days after MD permanently broke on our server so we
weren't able to perform any AV/spam checks on the incoming flood of crap.  
At that time our mail server had to be reconfigured to allow up to 600
slaves (from 60 previously) just to withstand the flood and still allow
customers to relay messages throught the server.  We also allow
attachments of up to 15MB.

15MB attachment x 60 slaves = 900MB tmpfs volume
900MB tmpfs volume x 2.5 recommened by David = 2250MB tmpfs volume

That's a lot of RAM to spend on a temp mail processing.  Is this accurate?  
What's the general recommendation of the group on the RAM needs?  Our new
system is 2 frontend boxes running dual 2.8 Xeons and a backend box
running dual 3.06 Xeons.  All 3 have 2GB of at present.  Will this be
adequate?

As far as mail load goes, I'm not sure what the current numbers are.  I
was brought back in to handle this project after not administrating the
mail system for the better part of a year.  At the time I was maintaining
these boxes they were handling anywhere between 25k-65k messages a day and
rejecting 260k pieces of spam per week (access list and numerous DNSBLs w/
Sendmail).  I know that the load has significantly increased over this
past year though.

Suggestions?  Thanks
 Justin



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