Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 03:32:40 -0400 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> Cc: GVB <gvb@tns.net>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail server... Message-ID: <4827.902734360@gjp.erols.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 05 Aug 1998 20:04:00 %2B0200." <35C89E8F.EB696A97@pipeline.ch>
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Andre Oppermann wrote in message ID <35C89E8F.EB696A97@pipeline.ch>: > I would suggest something like this: > 1x NetApp Filer for maildir storage (does RAID5 and backup) Incorrect. It does RAID 4, and in software. That, coupled with the fact that NFS over 1500 byte ethernet is not the best of ideas makes me wonder why you recommended it. Yes, it will work. It may even scale a bit. But it is far from an optimal solution. (if you did NFS over CDDI or FDDI it would work a bit better as you wouldn't need to scale the NFS read/write sizes down to avoid fragmentation) There are a number of other solutions, varying in technical skill required, which use unix machines as message stores and then use lower-powered machines infront of the message stores to direct inbound traffic. This way you can have multiple pop servers, and the users are directed transparently to the one which holds their mail without their changing anything. You can either do this simply (a POP3 proxy isn't that difficult), or you can go wild and write your own communications protocol to fetch & store messages on the stores, and have the customer-facing machines do more work. This scenario works ... we currently have 400k+ users in the proxied pop environment, with over 30k of them being online at any one time and checking their mail. We see (typically) 600-700 concurrent POP3 sessions. However, it does require a programmer to set up this way ... the NFS version works for anyone, but I (personally) wouldn't like to scale it up. > > also appriciated. Also, does FreeBSD take advantage of dual processers? Is > FreeBSD won't take advantage of two processors until release 3.0 which > due in october. And I wouldn't recommend SMP for a production environment unless you know what you are doing... Heavily I/O bound machines will not benefit because of the way the kernel is using locks. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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