Re: New Maia Implementation - Looking

I run one site that sees about 300k SMTP connections/day,
60K spam and 
about 10k ham. Running on FreeBSD 6.0 (x86/32bit), AMD
Opteron 
(~1.7GHz), 3G RAM, 4x36G 10k SATA RAID 0+1. Users aren't
great at 
confirming spam, so a couple of domain spam queues are over
200k. For 
these, the spam queue web interface is very slow, but
otherwise the 
machine works fine.

Do you know how many incoming SMTP connects you expect to
see before 
handing off to MM/amavisd?

You haven't mentioned the OS, MTA, SA modules, anti-virus
app(s) or SQL 
server you plan on using (as far as I remember the thread).
These will 
all matter to varying degrees.

But generally, for 70k total messages/day on a non-Windows
machine (I 
can't speak to specs for Windows - does MM even run on
Windows?), I 
would say you don't need dual CPUs, or 8G ram - I would do a
single 
(fast) CPU, 4G RAM, good RAID controller (no Promise-type
hybrids) and 
15K drives if you're using SAS, 10K SATA if 73G is big
enough as the 
base drive size. Don't cheap out on the drives. Get a dual
CPU capable 
machine, and make sure you have open RAM slots. Make adding
CPU/RAM, and 
then if needed, a second (MM only) machine part of the
"growth" proposal.

You can do quite alot with MM/SA with not alot of CPU/RAM if
you pay 
attention to tuning the db, MTA and maybe OS. Proper setup 
(process_quarantine and other cron jobs in particular) goes
a long way 
as well.

Did I mention don't cheap out on the drives 

YMMV, of course..

Tim Palmer

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> That's our combined incoming e-mail (both spam and
ham). Internal email from mailbox to mailbox on campus
(which is probably where most of our ham is) is through
Microsoft Exchange, so those will not go through the spam
filter. In addition many of our students and some part time
faculty do not use their email boxes.
> 
>  
> 
> Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
> 
> Infrastructure Technician
> 
> Department of Information Technology
> 
> Westfield State College
> 
> Wilson 105-A
> 
> (413) 572-8245
> 
> E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu
> 
>  
> 
> From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Joćo Carmona
> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 3:53 PM
> To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation -
Looking
> 
>  
> 
> Like I said before, we have 4 servers (3 MM + 1 Mysql).
The main specs are:
> 
>  
> 
> 1x MM box- 2xQuad Core E5345 8GB - 4x 76GB RAID 10 
> 
> 2x MM box- 2xDual Core E5120 4GB - 2x 76GB RAID 1
> 
> 1x SQL box - 2xQuad Core E5345 8GB - 4x 76GB RAID10
> 
>  
> 
> The MySQL server it's only for Maia.
> 
>  
> 
> The MM boxes, are filtering all e-mail to our customers
emails servers. 
> 
>  
> 
> The first MM box, have also Mysql configured,
"just in case" of Mysql box failure. This
structure is more than enough for current situation. Maybe
overkill but, but our customers demand performance and high
availability.
> 
>  
> 
> Well if your numbers are correct (70k mails/day), your
server is enough. One question, this number is your total
(spam+ham) mail received or is only the ham mail?
> 
>  
> 
> We received about 500K mails/day. About 10% of this
value is ham, the rest is virus+spam. 
> 
>  
> 
> Has anyone had experience with over 150k users?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Joćo Carmona
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Casartello, Thomas
> Sent: sexta-feira, 12 de Outubro de 2007 16:50
> To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com; RZemanmelwood.org
> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation -
Looking
> 
>  
> 
> Oh and I don't know if I mentioned, this server will
not have any mailboxes on it, only the user caches, and we
haven't decided whether we will cache the delivered e-mail
or not. So you think it would be appropriate to reduce it
down to dual-core instead of quad-core CPUs?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ---
> 
> What about the memory. Do you think 8 GB is overkill?
> 
>  
> 
> Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
> 
> Infrastructure Technician
> 
> Department of Information Technology
> 
> Westfield State College
> 
> Wilson 105-A
> 
> (413) 572-8245
> 
> E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
------------------------------------------------------------
------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Maia-users mailing list
> Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
> http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

Should probably mention this. We have an external MTA
running qmail that all mail will pass through before hitting
this box. This outside server also does SPF checking and
blocks all mail where the SPF result is "FAIL" (it
will allow "SOFTFAIL" through.) This outside
server performs recipient validation against our Active
Directory, and will block mail for users that don't exist so
only e-mails that are being sent to legitimate addresses on
our campus will actually be seen by our Maia server, and
since we use Exchange our Maia box won't see mail between
mailboxes inside our college unless the person is setup for
POP or IMAP (Most use either OWA or Outlook setup for
Exchange.) We will be running Fedora 7. I'll probably have
Postfix on the Maia box. It will check the mail against
amavisd/Maia. As for SA I'll probably be loading most of the
SARE rules, as well as an OCR checking plugin. (We'll also
use Clam for Virus Scanning.) We will be reducing the amount
of controls that users have because we have many non-tech
savvy users. We will not allow them to control their spam
and virus scanning levels, and we will not allow them to
control how many digests are sent. (Probably going to make a
custom web template.) We will set quarantine digests to
"1 minute" on everyone's account, and run the perl
script once a day as a daily cron job (Between 4 and 5 in
the morning.) We also have a lot of users who will not even
be bothered with touching their queues, so to avoid the
database getting huge we will likely be expiring items after
16 days or so. I'll probably use the "Instructions for
Fedora Core 5" installation that's on the Maia site.
Anyway from all the info everyone's given me, I'm probably
going to stick with duel CPUs, but I brought them down to
1.60 ghz quad core instead of 2.33, and I brought it down to
4 GB RAM. I also switched from RAID 5 to RAID 10, and upped
the 4 73 GB SAS drives from 10K to 15K. Thanks everyone for
all your info so far. It is much appreciated .

Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
Infrastructure Technician
Department of Information Technology
Westfield State College
Wilson 105-A
E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Palmer [mailto:timtany.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2007 12:52 AM
To: Casartello, Thomas
Cc: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation - Looking

I run one site that sees about 300k SMTP connections/day,
60K spam and 
about 10k ham. Running on FreeBSD 6.0 (x86/32bit), AMD
Opteron 
(~1.7GHz), 3G RAM, 4x36G 10k SATA RAID 0+1. Users aren't
great at 
confirming spam, so a couple of domain spam queues are over
200k. For 
these, the spam queue web interface is very slow, but
otherwise the 
machine works fine.

Do you know how many incoming SMTP connects you expect to
see before 
handing off to MM/amavisd?

You haven't mentioned the OS, MTA, SA modules, anti-virus
app(s) or SQL 
server you plan on using (as far as I remember the thread).
These will 
all matter to varying degrees.

But generally, for 70k total messages/day on a non-Windows
machine (I 
can't speak to specs for Windows - does MM even run on
Windows?), I 
would say you don't need dual CPUs, or 8G ram - I would do a
single 
(fast) CPU, 4G RAM, good RAID controller (no Promise-type
hybrids) and 
15K drives if you're using SAS, 10K SATA if 73G is big
enough as the 
base drive size. Don't cheap out on the drives. Get a dual
CPU capable 
machine, and make sure you have open RAM slots. Make adding
CPU/RAM, and 
then if needed, a second (MM only) machine part of the
"growth" proposal.

You can do quite alot with MM/SA with not alot of CPU/RAM if
you pay 
attention to tuning the db, MTA and maybe OS. Proper setup 
(process_quarantine and other cron jobs in particular) goes
a long way 
as well.

Did I mention don't cheap out on the drives 

YMMV, of course..

Tim Palmer

Casartello, Thomas wrote:
> That's our combined incoming e-mail (both spam and
ham). Internal email from mailbox to mailbox on campus
(which is probably where most of our ham is) is through
Microsoft Exchange, so those will not go through the spam
filter. In addition many of our students and some part time
faculty do not use their email boxes.
> 
>  
> 
> Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
> 
> Infrastructure Technician
> 
> Department of Information Technology
> 
> Westfield State College
> 
> Wilson 105-A
> 
> (413) 572-8245
> 
> E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu
> 
>  
> 
> From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Joćo Carmona
> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 3:53 PM
> To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com
> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation -
Looking
> 
>  
> 
> Like I said before, we have 4 servers (3 MM + 1 Mysql).
The main specs are:
> 
>  
> 
> 1x MM box- 2xQuad Core E5345 8GB - 4x 76GB RAID 10 
> 
> 2x MM box- 2xDual Core E5120 4GB - 2x 76GB RAID 1
> 
> 1x SQL box - 2xQuad Core E5345 8GB - 4x 76GB RAID10
> 
>  
> 
> The MySQL server it's only for Maia.
> 
>  
> 
> The MM boxes, are filtering all e-mail to our customers
emails servers. 
> 
>  
> 
> The first MM box, have also Mysql configured,
"just in case" of Mysql box failure. This
structure is more than enough for current situation. Maybe
overkill but, but our customers demand performance and high
availability.
> 
>  
> 
> Well if your numbers are correct (70k mails/day), your
server is enough. One question, this number is your total
(spam+ham) mail received or is only the ham mail?
> 
>  
> 
> We received about 500K mails/day. About 10% of this
value is ham, the rest is virus+spam. 
> 
>  
> 
> Has anyone had experience with over 150k users?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Joćo Carmona
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> From: maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com
[mailto:maia-users-bouncesrenaissoft.com] On Behalf
Of Casartello, Thomas
> Sent: sexta-feira, 12 de Outubro de 2007 16:50
> To: maia-usersrenaissoft.com; RZemanmelwood.org
> Subject: Re: [Maia-users] New Maia Implementation -
Looking
> 
>  
> 
> Oh and I don't know if I mentioned, this server will
not have any mailboxes on it, only the user caches, and we
haven't decided whether we will cache the delivered e-mail
or not. So you think it would be appropriate to reduce it
down to dual-core instead of quad-core CPUs?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ---
> 
> What about the memory. Do you think 8 GB is overkill?
> 
>  
> 
> Thomas E. Casartello, Jr.
> 
> Infrastructure Technician
> 
> Department of Information Technology
> 
> Westfield State College
> 
> Wilson 105-A
> 
> (413) 572-8245
> 
> E-Mail: tcasartellowsc.ma.edu
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
------------------------------------------------------------
------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Maia-users mailing list
> Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
> http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users

_______________________________________________
Maia-users mailing list
Maia-usersrenaissoft.com
http://www.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/maia-users