Re: High volume mail handling architecture
On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 05:59, Theodore Knab <tjk@annapolislinux.org> wrote:
> RAM is always not the answer with 32Bit machines. You can cause bounce
> buffers with too much RAM. The sweet spot for Linux on a 32Bit platform
> seems to be 4GB of RAM. I had 10GB of RAM in a Courier IMAP server and the
> server had problems releasing swap after a week. The kernel was compiled
> for 64GB of RAM. When I reduced the RAM to 4GB and recompiled for a 4GB
> machine these problems disappeared.
The solution to this is to use AMD64. If you run an AMD64 kernel with 32bit
user-space (should work well on Debian) then you get efficient access to >4G
of RAM and the ability to run well-tested x86 binaries.
If I was going to purchase hardware for a big mail store now I would only
consider Opteron. The other 64bit CPUs don't offer the bang for the buck and
Intel's x86_64 offering is still quite new and difficult to obtain.
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