From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 22 16:41:29 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F8AB37B403 for ; Wed, 22 May 2002 16:41:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from apollo.backplane.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id g4MNfOhU042445; Wed, 22 May 2002 16:41:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.12.3/8.12.3/Submit) id g4MNfNtt042444; Wed, 22 May 2002 16:41:23 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 16:41:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200205222341.g4MNfNtt042444@apollo.backplane.com> To: Omar Thameen Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Re: tuning a CPU bound server References: <3CEC0E35.26DBB385@pipeline.ch> <20020522181822.A51741@mail.k12us.com> <3CEC2849.CBAFE41A@mindspring.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I think this has gotten off-topic. I am going to go back and respond to the original posting. When I was doing BEST Internet we had very similar problems with our mail servers. We were constantly cpu-bound. I was constantly fiddling with it (sendmail in this case). For months. For years, in fact. We did things like put sendmail's dns cache in a ramdisk, split the queues, tuned the retry periods, etc. The fiddling ultimately produced incremental gains but in retrospect it was a waste of time. The solution that worked... *REALLY* worked, was two throw more horsepower at the problem. Even more so the solution was to simply add more servers. I created a set of 3 incoming mail servers and a set of 3 outgoing mail servers. The mail servers were load balanced simply with an IN A (DNS) round robin, which worked wonderfully. Separating the incoming from the outgoing servers allowed me to do relatively simple tuning of the incoming servers for incoming traffic, and relatively simple tuning of the outgoing servers for outgoing traffic. One also gets the added perk of being able to turn down individual servers for maintainance without taking down the entire company's mail system in the process. So what I would recommend is that you add another duel-cpu server and load balance the traffic with DNS. It's worth doing some tuning but I would not waste my time at it. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message