Re: Fedora Core 2 AMD 64 Bit: good platform for heavy load mail server?

[Christopher Hicks <chicks chicks net>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 Tobias Weisserth shaped the bits to say:
> On Monday, 27. September 2004 04:46, Andrew W. Donoho wrote:
> > On Sep 26, 2004, at 20:19, Tobias Weisserth wrote:
> > > The server can expect more than 15.000 spam mails a day it has to sort
> > > out, so
> > > heavy and constant load can be expected.
> >
> > My FC2 x86_64 system easily handles that many emails a day. All of my
> > problems started when I added a second drive to the LVM2 partition. I
> > expect that if you use traditional partitioning that you will not see
> > this problem. Stay tuned, I should have a few more reports soon.
>
> This is good. Please keep reporting :-) Did you experience any stability
> issues as sudden system freezes and the likes? I really need high uptimes.

Sorry for missing the start of this thread.  I'm running an Opteron 146 on 
an Asus board with a gig of ECC/Reg SDRAM and I've been extremely pleased. 
My current uptime is three days, but I've been up to 10 days and I've only 
had the box for three weeks.  It hasn't crashed once.  I've been very 
pleased with the "bang-for-the-buck" of this box.  Opteron+SATA is truly a 
step up in overall system bang-for-the-buck.

> I guess I will work with software RAID as I've had good experience with 
> it.

The Linux software RAID performs as well as many hardware RAID cards and 
it works regardless of what controller you have so if one dies you can 
replace it with something generic to get by instead of needing that exact 
controller or motherboard.  Good stuff.

> LVM is on my "to learn" list but I haven't really seen any advantage of 
> it that would make me run and scream ;-)

If you're expecting to add disk space down the road and want to be able to 
grow your filesystems into it then LVM is as easy software RAID to get 
going and very cool.  If you're happy with static filesystem sizes for the 
forseeable future, then don't worry about it.

I haven't tried LVM under x86_64, only on x86, so there may be bug's there 
I'm unaware of.  Within the next few weeks this Opteron 146 box is going 
to become our primary mail server.

Our current mail server is doing SpamAssassin, multiple RBL's, multiple 
virus engine checks on 30k messages a day and its an Athlon 1700 with 
512M!  One of our motivations for upgrading this box is to get some more 
CPU available for dealing with "email rush hour", but the Athlon has 
handled the 30k without any noticable difficulty.  (Some other things 
running on that box smoke it, but not email.)  So doing 15k messages on 
any AMD64 should be pretty safe.  :)

(Oh yeah, all the boxes are on Fedora Core 2!)

--
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare