Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 02:07:32 -0500 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: "Kurt Jaeger" <pi@complx.LF.net> Cc: stuart@eclipse.net.uk (Stuart Henderson), andrew@squiz.co.nz (Andrew McNaughton), haifeng@ms.lawton.com.cn (Haifeng Guo), freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail server setup Message-ID: <72564.921136052@gjp.erols.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 04 Mar 1999 13:33:17 %2B0100." <m10IXJV-000zycC@complx.LF.net>
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"Kurt Jaeger" wrote in message ID <m10IXJV-000zycC@complx.LF.net>: > Depends on the setup. No, it doesn't. NFS is not the best idea for any system which does hundreds or thousands of directory lookups per second with little or no file i/o in comparison. If you think about it for a second, a mail system is just that (in general). You get a lot of people checking mail, and only a few of those have (new) mail and download it. This makes NFS a serious pain in the rear (since it can't really do directory caching). If you ended up doing a lot of I/O, you'd probably want to be looking at CDDI or FDDI for NFS also, to cut down on the number of packets and/or fragments flying around (depending on how you set it up). > Have a look at: > > http://www.earthlink.net/company/mail_arch.html > > It describes their e-mail architecture for quite a large user community. <cynical> I've often wondered what kick-back they get from NetApp for publishing that </cynical> There are other alternatives to NFS. Doing POP3 & SMTP proxying makes a lot more sense IMNSHO. You basically end up with a set of front-end machines which do username lookups and route incoming traffic to the appropriate backend. The system is highly scalable. You just add more machines. By my guess, you'd have to go well past 1m users to max out full duplex fast ethernet in this setup. Past posts on this from any number of ppl (mostly me tho :) ) should be in the archives. 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-isp" in the body of the message
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