Scalable Mail solution with NAS
Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Wed Jan 31 15:33:35 UTC 2001
On Wed, 31 Jan 2001 10:13:40 EST, chrisb at kippona.com said:
> Is the number of mailboxes the key metric? What breaks sendmail + "a
> very big disk"? Isn't it the traffic?
The two biggest problems with very-high-volume servers and sendmail are:
1) You *really* need to use multiple queues and some sort of aging scheme,
so mail backlogged for dead hosts gets out of your main queue. If a queue
gets too full, Sendmail exhibits bad O(N**2) behavior in sorting/running
the queue.
2) If you are serving mailboxes (as opposed to a Listserv-type machine where
the mail *leaves*), what can kill you isn't the sendmail, but the local
delivery program and POP/IMAP checks. You get enough bozo users who have
set Eudora to check for new mail every 2 minutes, you'll get bogged down
no matter HOW fast Sendmail itself is.
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech
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