Re: Mail server

[Markus Schabel <markus.schabel@tgm.ac.at>]

Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote:
> Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a 
> mail server for N users?
>
> I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things 
> for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to 
> suit. \:
>
> I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help.

Depends more on the software than on the numer of users. And the number
of users isn't really interesting. It's interesting how much traffic
they generate. I was running sendmail+popper on a P2-500MHz, 512MB RAM
with some users popping every minute - about 1 mails in/minute and 10
pop-connections/minute and had a load-average of about 1.0 - and in
times with much bounces up to 20.

Now we're running postfix with courier-pop/imap, AntiVir, Spamfilter on
a P4-1.7GHz with 512MB RAM and an IPC-Vortex-SCSI-RAID-Controller for
the spool. Also installed is a webmail, the User-Database comes from
LDAP (also running local) and we have a load of nearly 0 - and slightly
more traffic.

I'd suggest you use qmail or postfix. On the postfix-mailinglist are
some people with a _lot_ of traffic (thousands of messages / minute) and
they handle this also with something with about 1GHz - mail-delivery
isn't really a CPU-issue, it's highly I/O-based so fast disk give you
much more performance than a faster CPU.

regards
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