[Mailman-Users] large lists question

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 04:12, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 10:34:47PM -0400, Jon Carnes wrote:
> > Lets not forget about the biggest bottle neck of all... the Hard Drive.  
> > For maximum through-put, you need to use a SCSI drive or RAID array as the 
> > Disk Subsystem for the server.  If this is mission critical the obvious 
> > choice is a SCSI / RAID disk subsystem.
> 
> Actually if you have enough RAM, the whole config.pck should fit in the disk
> cache, so  it's not a  huge deal (but  yes, I use SCSI  and RAID for  all my
> servers)

Might be the case if your delivery system is different to your MLM
system.  Otherwise your MTA is going to do an awful lot of flushing
stuff at disk during the SMTP conversations.  [Does Mailman really not
fsync its delivery data during message delivery?]

Unless you are playing very fast and loose with the RFCs (821/2821) then
you'll find that an MTA is strongly disk (transaction) limited.   Hence
discussions about journalling filesystems with NVRAM journals :-)
Of course you probably *could* make a case for having less stringent
disk requirements on an MLM - as long as you ensured a crash would only
ever result in duplicate delivery - doing this could give you a
significant speed up.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]