Re: Problems with scheduler

[brtmac@ksu.ksu.edu]

Verily did Lee J. Silverman say on April 21, 1995:

>On Fri, 21 Apr 1995, Tom Samplonius wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 21 Apr 1995, Henry Timmerman wrote:
>> 
>> > processed). Because the load is quite big (1000 messages per day) I 
>> > thought that this is the problem, but Zmailer says it can handle 
>> > 2000 messages per day. Machine running Linux is a *high* end 486.
>> 
>>   1000 messages a day is a very light load for even a 486.  A 486 system 
>> should be able to handle three times that and still not exceed 1.0 load.
>
>Let me state this a little more strongly: 1000 messages a day is a NOTHING
>load for a 486 running linux, even under sendmail 8.6.10, which we're
>still using.  This machine typically makes 20,000 deliveries a day, and
>still manages to support an average of 10 people logged in (nobody running
>emacs, though :-) ).  With Zmailer, it should be able to handle a
>significantly higher mail load than 20,000 deliveries a day.  Hell, even
>smail can handle 1000 messages a day with no problem.  (BTW, this is a
>486/100 with 16M RAM). 

I'm curious about one aspect of zmailer's performance.  We have a
system with >11,000 entries in the passwd file.  We are running
sendmail 8.6.12 on a SS5/70.  sendmail is currently able to handle the
load, but until we upgraded to the SS5 from an IPC stock sendmail
wasn't able to.  I was able to make sendmail keep up with the load by
replacing the getpw routines with routines that accessed a gdbm file
with the passwd information stored in it.

How does zmailer access the passwd file?  Is anyone running zmailer on
a system with a large passwd file?  If not, how do people deal with
thousands of mailboxes?

Thanks.

Brett McCoy, UNIX Systems Administrator
Computing and Network Services, Kansas State University,  Manhattan KS  66506
vox: (913) 532-4908 / fax: (913) 532-5914 / e-mail: brtmac@ksu.ksu.edu
PGP Key available on request