Scalable Mail solution with NAS

Mike Johnson mike.johnson at isunnetworks.com
Wed Jan 31 15:50:49 UTC 2001


chrisb at kippona.com [chrisb at kippona.com] wrote:
 
> Is the number of mailboxes the key metric?  What breaks sendmail + "a
> very big disk"?  Isn't it the traffic?

Not that traffic isn't important, but you can get a lot more data from
inferences based off of the number of mailboxes.  You can speculate
on the traffic, for instance.  You can also look at your disks.

In my opinion, delivery of messages to mailboxes is easy.  Yes, you
have to tune sendmail or switch to qmail or postfix to deal with the
amount of messages, but delivery is easy.  Retreiving them is a
bit more difficult and takes some planning.  Using mbox format with
a POP daemon that copies the entire spool?  Allowing 25MB spools?
Welcome to doubling your disk space and adding more RAM to your
servers.  Using maildir and a decent IMAP server?  Then you can
use NFS spool storage and multiple IMAP servers with some fun load
balancing.

But, if you look at the total number of mailboxes, you can figure
out how much disk space you'll need, approximate how many messages
per second will be sent and received, and figure out how many
users will be retrieving messages per second.

I am wondering if this belongs on a networks list, though...

> Chris

Mike
-- 
Mike Johnson
Network Engineer / iSun Networks, Inc.
Morrisville, NC
All opinions are mine, not those of my employer




More information about the NANOG mailing list