[K12OSN] postfix/dovecot gurus,,a question

[cisna-barry at wc235.k12.il.us]

Hello list,

Wondering if anyone here,,can give me any tips on tweaking,,
Postfix/Dovecot,, conf files to speed things up a bit.
Our school consolidated over the summer so our email list has went up
some. Problem,is,when one of the three secretaries mass emails
announcments,with a doc attached,to all in the email global address book,,
the email server gets pulled down to nothing so it is unaccessable,
for,,from 5-10 mins,,and needless to say,,i get calls," email is
down",,,blah,,blah,,,for this short period of time,,
Other than this, this thing it works great,,and im afraid if i start
tweaking,,ill break it.WOuld i gain any by upping the "Resource
limit...directive in php.ini??Or the number of child processes in Postfix
.conf?  Maybe I should lower current values to were the server takes
longer to process stuff,, but is at least accesable??
I  have looked at the sever ..while this is happening and of corse
resource monitor goes ballistic,,and the hard drive is on solid for 5-10
mins??
Does this seem right?

This is a 2.4 GHZ single processor,,,machine,,with 2 Gigs of ram,,
( This is just on an IDE drive(s) )

I have the Resource Limits in php.ini set to memory limit=10M
I think default was 8M
child processes,, in Postfix is default =100
I did see an older "howto" on using Postfix/Dovecot on making a cache
file/folder,,to use memory buffer,,,but this didn't do anything as far as
reducing the "lag/slowdown " for the period of 5 - 10 mins,,,
Ive read were some use two servers/one incoming//one outgoing to utilize
two(exisiting) processors,,rather than one, which makes sense but id
like,,not to do this drastic,,if i can keep from it..


using .. Postfix/Dovecot/Squirrelmail/amavisd-new/clam/Spamassasin..

I tryed to get them to use Mailman,,,which I setup,but needless to say
that idea,,went over like a led balloon..:)..
Any ideas,,,??

Thanks,,
Barry Cisna