Fedora Core 2 AMD 64 Bit: good platform for heavy load mail server?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 21:19, Tobias Weisserth wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I am looking for a stable 64bit distribution that will serve as the platform 
> for a heavy load mail server, AMD 64bit based.
> 
> The server can expect more than 15.000 spam mails a day it has to sort out, so 
> heavy and constant load can be expected.
> 
> Since I read about stability problems with 64bit Fedora Core 2 & 3 regarding 
> kernel memory leaks when running 32 bit applications I am wondering whether 
> Fedora is my distribution of choice for this job.
> 
> Has anybody high and constant load experiences with Fedora's 64bit 
> distribution?
> 
> kind regards,
> Tobias W.

I can not answer your question directly since the mail server I used was
RH8 based.  However it was handling 3000 to 6000 spam messages a day
using spamassassin 2.64.  I did find at times under massive spam loads
that the load average would hit 20+. This would slow things down
tremendously.

I found that when I implemented greylisting on that server it ran at
idle from that point on.  Greylisting reduced the spam to 5 to 10 a day
at most so spamassassin did not require as many resources.

So while I think the setup you have specified can probably handle the
load, particularly if you are using spamassassin 3.0 with surbl enabled,
you may want to cut much of the spam traffic off at the pass by using
greylisting.

Sendmail setup with procmail and milter-greylist is what I used.  There
are other greylist implementations for other MTAs as well as sendmail.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

"It's in process":
	So wrapped up in red tape that the situation is almost hopeless.