On Fri, 2002-01-11 at 12:42, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote: > Figuring for 32K block size, each message claimed to be 7K, he could easily > store 3,750,000 messages, with $MAIL_DAEMON set to just expire messages > not delivered after say, 12 hours (he said after 3-4 they were useless) > that's quite a bit of room to grow. (assuming a 120G drive dedicated to mail) > > I'm not sure how important raid would be for long-term data reliability > considering his comments about it being useless after a short amount of time. > I don't think that the purpose of RAID, in this case, is for data reliability, which doesn't sound like the key to this issue, but for increased I/O performance. Depending on how smart caching really is, throwing a lot of memory at the problem might be even more rewarding, and one way to make sure that that would scale up would be to set this up on a Mosix cluster. My entirely amateur understanding is that this sort of process generates a lot of threads/processes that might well benefit from parallelizing -- and if it does, the answer to increased demand on the server would probably be, "well, let's just add some nodes and add some more RAID arrays." But I could be wrong. -- ------------------------------------- There's a widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun, And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri Who tells how the work was done. -------------------------------------