On 30 Sep 2004, at 15:55, Oliver Falk wrote:
Someone on the linuxmanagers list suggested I post my question here, so here goes:
I'm looking for pointers (past experience in particular) for sizing a mail server for a large-ish mail install based on postfix, cyrus, amavisd-new, clamav, spamassassin, and web mail (most likely imp) serving around 100k mailboxes. I estimate I'll need to be able to pass through the whole chain around 40msgs/sec continuously to be on the safe side. If possible, I'd like to do this on a single server. Cyrus murder probably isn't an option, but I think I could swing a separate box to do the content filtering. Would, say, a 4-cpu Xeon with ~8GB RAM suffice for the MTA/IMAP combination?
I/O, I/O, I/O -- it's off to work we go!!
mail systems need primarily disk bandwidth. Get a killer disk array (fibre-channel or SCSI) and that will keep you happy. The Xeon is nice, but it's disk bandwidth you *need*. I can recommend the StorageTek D-series disk systems, but a bit expensive.
That's not fully correct. Yes, it's true that mail systems need
primarily disk bandwith. But if you run - as he pointed out he will -
spamassassin, amavisd, clamav and so on, you will also need a lot of CPU
power and Memory, especially if you have many users who get a lot of
mail.
he seemed willing to offload that to another box, so I chose not to cover that point and his box does seem more than adequate (if properly utilized) for most content scanning.
I should have made that point explicitly of course.
Regards, Mark
My setup for about 1200 users (~ 60000 - 70000 mails/day): * Some IBM machine * 2 GB RAM * Dual-Xeon (2.66 GHz) * 100 GB Harddisk (SCSI 5 with IBM ServeRAID Controller)
That setup is OK, but there's allready more memory and larger hardisks on our wishlist. :-)
Best, Oliver
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