Re: [cobalt-developers] Replacing sendmail

["Robert G. Fisher" <rfisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 05:47:09PM -0700, Jeff Lasman wrote:
> Yes, I know about: O RefuseLA=20
> 
> but the question is how can I estimate how many emails per hour equate
> to load average => 20.

All depends on what else, if anything, is running on the box, how
much RAM and what the processor and bus speeds are.  load average
is roughly just the average of jobs in progress / x minute(s).

Obviosly faster machines tend to have lower load averages as they
churn out jobs quicker and have less waiting around to be processed.

> And I also know about: O MaxDaemonChildren=12
> 
> but the question is how can I estimate how many emails per hour equate
> to 12 or more daemons running.  And another question is how high can I
> safely raise this?

Depends on how many people you have connecting to the mail server.
For my case when I was debugging this, I actually have mine set to
120 for our mail server -- but this is a machine that literally 
hundreds of users access consistently as their SMTP relay as well
as accepting SMTP connections for a few hundred domains.  This
high a number can be a problem on some machines that don't handle
the higher number of file handles properly -- latest kernels shouldn't
have a problem, older ones could run into some poll() glitches.

> I think it's perfectly fair for Cobalt to give me some numbers here. 
> Can you?  I've already got a tech support call in for second level, and
> it's been a week.  Can someone give me an answer here?

Honestly Jeff, it's not really fair to expect anyone to be able to
give you an exact number -- it's a matter of trial and error and
judgement calls made by the SA in cases like this.  There are a
lot of other variables to be pulled into the equation -- However,
if you've found that throttling SMTP connections back to 500
per hour solves the problem, perhaps that's good enough for now.

I know we've covered a series of questions on the list already;
realistically, those are some of the questions that need to be
answered before your current answer can be found.

-- 
Robert G. Fisher		     NEOCOM Microspecialists Inc. 
System Administrator/Programmer      (540) 666-9533 x 116