On Wednesday 09 January 2002 10:21 am, Jay Kline wrote: > I am doing some research to set up a high volume SMTP relay server for a > company. As of right now, they average roughly 4000 7K messages per minute > during the work day (a total of about 1 million messages per 8 hour work > day). By the end of the year, their estimates are to be sending 12 times > that. As this is outgoing mail only, local delivery really isnt a big > deal, we have one incoming server set up for that, and is handling just > fine. > > Does anyone have any suggestions for a complete setup for this? We would > like to keep the number of servers to a minimum, and the servers would be > dedicated to SMTP relay, not really running anything else. We are not > opposed to running comercial software, right now we use PTMA (from Port25), > but liceneing for it is $9000 per box, and wouldlike something a bit > cheaper. Also, the other obvious problem is bandwith. Right now I belive > we have 2 T1's set up for this, and I know we will need more down the road. > > Any advice would be great. > > > Jay The canonical answer for high-load servers is BSD, which appears to perform better under high loads than Linux, although a mosix cluster (see http://www.mosix.org) might be a better, if a bit bleeding-edge choice, particularly if the process is going to be processor-bound, rather than I/O bound, as that scales up in an obvious sort of way -- just add on more nodes if things start to slow down. You're probably going to want SCSI and some sort of RAID -- some of the performance data I've seen for RAID-5 suggests that you really don't take much of a performance hit vs. RAID-1 as one would intuitively think. The real issue, of course, is going to be the processing of the mail, as pretty much any sub-modern-or-better PC is going to be able to keep up with a T1 or two, just in terms of brute-force input and output. My entirely unexpert guess is that pretty much any high-performance *nix box is going to have little or no trouble keeping up with the kind of load you're talking about, particularly if you're using postfix, which has the reputation of giving better performance than sendmail.