From: Gary D. Margiotta (garytbe.net)
Date: Tue May 02 2006 - 17:10:11 CDT

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> At our big site, we've got something on the order of 25-30k messages per
> day. I'm planning on running postfix with greylist and possibly an
> amavisd-new/spamassassin scanner on the same box. This is going to be both a
> gateway and smart host for incoming/outgoing.

I'm currently running 2 older Compaq DL360s, dual P-III 800, 768MB RAM,
18GB mirrored SCSI disks. Postfix and SpamAssassin are on these 2 boxes,
and they are our main border servers, they process the mail and pass it
onto the rest of our servers. We're passing around 25k messages per day
on this setup, and it's got plenty of room to grow from my perspective.
I'll probably bump up the RAM at some point, but that's about it.

IMO, for gateway servers, which don't host mail spools and user mailboxes,
you can get more mileage out of them, since there's less the servers have
to do, since they just receive, scan, and forward. There's no interactive
users chewing up memory and disk, and no local deliveries to tax your disk
subsystems too much (yes, you'll get a lot of disk use regardless, but not
as much comparitively). The only thing you really need to worry about is
your spam and a/v processing, because that could be RAM and CPU intensive.

> At a smaller site, they only need a new outgoing server, with only about
> 2000 messages a day.
>
> For the small site, I'm thinking a Sun X2100 server with mirrored SATA
> disks. This is one of their new cheap x86 (AMD) servers. Perhaps a second
> one just for redundancy, but I have to think that even with the OS and
> postfix queues on a single spindle (just mirrored), 2000 should be no
> problem.

Plenty. One of our servers hosts 200 domains plus 400 users' worth of
mail (send/receive over 3000 mails daily), and it's running happily on an
older P4 Celeron, with PATA mirrored disks, and it's a Promise "software"
controller at that.

> For the bigger site, I'm thinking one of the slightly beefier Sun boxes with
> some SCSI disks. Currently our mail gateway is on a Sun E250, and I think
> anything new from Sun with SCSI disks is going to be beefier than that.

My rule of thumb is that if what you're using now is working OK, doing the
same job the new stuff will, any newer hardware you get will be able to
handle it and plenty more.

> But I wonder how we get hard numbers on the IO operations per second that we
> require in order to have some real data on justification for hardware...
> googling around and searching the postfix list, I'm finding occasional
> individual sizing questions, but no good howtos on sizing in general for
> postfix. Any suggestions?

All depends on how you think you'll grow, but I don't think with the
hardware you're thinking of you'll run into any problems.

> thanks
>
> johnS
>

-Gary

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