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Subject: Re: high capacity configuration nightmares
From: GeyerKaol.com
Date: Wed Oct 25 2000 - 12:03:11 CDT

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 22:33:20 +0100 (BST), Pere Camps <pereulivatar.com> said:

> I'm quite new to postfix and I've found myself in a position of
> having to setup a postfix box which has to handle the around 20
> emails/second and I simply can not configure it correctly. I hope you can
> help me.

    Sorry, I am on vacation at the moment, and can't get my regular access to
work, so I'm forced to use my wife's AOL account.

    Anyway, this issue has been hashed to death on this list previously. I
suggest you check the archives.

    However, in short, your critical limiting factor is going to be
synchronous meta-data updates. With your hardware configuration, the best
way to eliminate that will be to use FreeBSD with softupdates, and use RAID
0+1 for the mail spool (not RAID 5, which will be the slowest possible disk
access you can get). If you have money to burn, you can use a solid-state
disk instead, and then you're never slowed down by rotating media.

    This is basically all covered in the presentation I did for SANE'98
entitled "Sendmail Performance Tuning for Large Systems", which can be found
at <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/sendmail-tuning/>. However,
most of the problems and solutions are also applicable to postfix, or any
other MTA I know of.

> ps: some free beer in the London (UK) area if you solve this! ;)

    I live in Belgium, so I might actually be able to collect on that. ;-)

        -Brad