[Mailman-Users] Hardware Requirements

[J C Lawrence]

On 11 Jul 2002 17:14:36 +0100 
Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham at dev.InTechnology.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-07-11 at 16:59, J C Lawrence wrote: 

> [I have reordered the quotes here - sorry if I have broken the
> meaning]

Hehn.  A favoured habit of mine.

> But full data journalling on an MTA type system can gain you
> performance by having the disk head basically moving linearly as the
> journal writes.  On a fast turnround system by the time it comes to
> writing out the actual file contents and directory entries and stuff,
> the file is no longer pertinant (ie already been processed/delivered
> etc) and so the write is optomised out....

Excellent point.  The added latency can allow a lazy journal to nuke the
transaction.

> SCSI or even better a *good* hardware RAID controller.  

The real problem with proffering advice here is that we don't know his
loading.  Without some idea of his mail volumes and delivery targets (if
he's lucky the majority will be local LAN) its really tough to say what
he'd need for hardware.  Still, I do like the Mylex DAC960 cards...

> Filesystems are a religious issue but I still keep hearing more
> mentions of resiserfs going completely tits-up for my liking.  Great
> ideas but there still seem to be some problems there.....

I can't comment well to this other than to note that I've been running
ReiserFS almost exclusively (I've generally left / and /boot as ext2,
but that's less than 128Meg combined) for a couple years now on my list
servers, desktops, web servers, etc.  I had one problem in the early
months which may have been exacerbated or caused by a failing drive and
a known-bad kernel (the TLB IPI wait bug).  Beyond that it has been
flawless.  

As always, its the proverbial personal experience card...

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.