| Re: Tweaking sendmail
Sumit Malhotra wrote:
> i am running sendmail on solaris 7.0. the sendmail being used as
SunOS 5.7 = Solaris 2.7 or marketng speak: "solaris 7" (neither here
nor there).
> internet gateway in our organisation handles ll incoming/outgoing
> mails of the organization .
> With around 70 mails being receivd per sec and sendmail process
> generally in range of 100-500 the handling is getting a bit
> tough(Connection getting timed out, mailq reaching 1000 etc.)
>
> will tweaking in the sendmail timouts help in this case ?
Not usually.
you want disk IO. Multiple spindles, multiple spool directories.
There's a book written by a former compatriot I refer to as The Stephen
King of sendmail authors...
Sendmail Performance Tuning, by Nick Christenson.
It would seem appropriate.
(I suppose I'm alone in calling him that, but it starts somewhere ;).
Also Solaris 9 has better file system than Solaris 7.
Veritas is MUCH better.
You can also run FreeBSD 5.2 (with FFS2) on SPARCS.
ftp.freebsd.org:/pub/FreeBSD/releases/sparc64/ISO-IMAGES/5.2/
Nicely fast file system.
Sun's file systems just aren't really impressive. fortunately, they
ship slow disks, so you don't notice too quickly.
15kRPM disks and groups of them.
Seriously, ponder many disk spindles and an OS upgrade or Veritas FS
if you can.
I came to love Baydel RAID arrays - the fastest RAID I've found for
a reasonable cost. it regularly smokes RAID boxes costing 3x more.
What's nice is that it has a big (mirrored, battery backed) RAM write
cache and a really fast RAID algorithm.
With mail, you write the queue file and delete it 5 seconds later. With
the Baydels, this usually means that the files never hit actual disk.
I brought a loaded E250 that the customer insisted on using (450Mhz x 2
- wow!) that handled 40k messages/hr and was often at a load average of
15+ down to 3 with a new SCSI card (it was put: "Oh, not Sun SCSI, fast
SCSI") and an older 50GB Baydel (we needed the RAID controller and
cache, not lots of disk).
Claus, what's the 8.12 feature that lets me not fsync if the machine
behind (next hop) gets the message and accepts it? I learnt it well
over 20 months ago and forget...
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