[Mimedefang] Re: "Please try again later"

[David F. Skoll]

John Rudd wrote:

> Sep 10 09:13:49 cats-mx1.ucsc.edu mimedefang-multiplexor[18967]: [ID
> 760071 mail.warning] No free slaves

That's a load issue.

"md-mx-ctrl histo" will probably reveal that you're almost always maxed
out on slaves.

[...]

> So, we stay in a Solaris/Sparc holding pattern for now.  But the
> v210/v240 boxes are actually pretty nice.  But, yeah, $/Hz is still
> better on Intel.  Or even PPC.

Understood.

> I wouldn't mind Linux so much if it wasn't such a moving target ...
> while it's not as fragile as windows, it seems like you need to do as
> much, if not more, patching and rebuilding on it in order to keep up
> with what's current

It depends on the distro.  I find Debian to be very nice; we've pretty
much standardized on it for our technical staff, and on Ubuntu for the
non-technical staff.  We still have some legacy Red Hat/Fedora boxes,
which will be retired when their hardware dies and replaced with
Debian ones.

... and you almost have to do that if you want to
> remain compatible with any new features you need to implement.  If it
> were as easy as OSX ("click this button to see what updates are out
> there, check which ones you want, click update, sometimes you have to
> reboot"), that wouldn't be such a problem.

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

or you could use the synaptic graphical tool which works pretty much as
you described for OSX.

[...]

>> What's your daily mail volume?

> We get around 150k messages/day,

A vanilla P4 PC at 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM should easily handle that
with MIMEDefang.  $/MHz. :-) A dual Xeon with 2GB of RAM and good
disks should handle upwards of 500k messages/day with CanIt, which is
MIMEDefang plus extra overhead for the SQL database.

By the way, did you make sure that /var/spool/MIMEDefang was on a
tmpfs volume on your Sun machines?  If you don't do that, it will kill
performance.  You might want to verify that.

Regards,

David.