Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 12:43:36 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: rashid@rk.ios.com (Rashid Karimov) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Some SERIOUS NFS usage - advice needed Message-ID: <199602190213.MAA07762@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199602181620.LAA05842@rk.ios.com> from "Rashid Karimov" at Feb 18, 96 11:20:39 am
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Rashid Karimov stands accused of saying: > > We have this idea here of putting online multiple > mail servers working off single NFS mounted partition. > It's about 9Gb+ of /var/mail shared between 3-4 hosts > ( we'll probably do round-robin DNS for them or will > just have MX with same priorities to redistribute > the load evenly). Is your current mailserver overloaded? Have you been able to identify the bottleneck(s)? Is it really compute power that's the limitation? I'm kinda skeptical here, unless you are receiving _lots_ of mail. Going for a multinode arrangement will increase your compute power and (possibly) your network bandwidth, but it won't help the setup/knockdown time for connections and it will decrease your disk bandwidth. > So the Big Question is: will it WORK ??? Er. You might have to fiddle sendmail to lock mailboxes in an alternative fashion. > Will it be fast enough ( the thing should serve ~20.000 - 50.000 > active e-mail accounts), will there be problems with locking > mail-boxes for delivery and reading , what's gonna happen > to the network , it there a sense in using 100Mb Ethernet, > how stable is NFS code ? NFS locking isn't yet supported. Your network will potentially be plastered with lots of NFS traffic in addition to the mail. What counts as 'active'? If we assume that 5 mails a day is 'average', at 50 000 users that's about three a second. I'd say that's well within the capacity of a medium-sized mailserver (but I'd want to test it to be sure 8) If you get this thing running, make sure you put something up on the Web about it; a mailserver that size must be a pretty rare beast. > If the thing will work, may be we will do the same with news > system. For news, you want one machine hosting the news, and a number of NFS clients running readers only. Don't try to run your news databases across NFS, it's just too slow. > Does FreeBD support any of them RAID arrays ? Or the only way is > to get one in H/W implementation ? The ccd driver may well be up to running news - Joe Greco? > Rashid -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "I seek PEZ!" - The Tick [[
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