Hi I know this is slightly OT, but I'd appreciate any responses. I intend to set up a box running SUSE, sendmail, and probably something like Majordomo. The sole purpose of the box will be to act as a mailing list server. All the mailing lists will be announcement lists, sending out about 100 000 messages a month (email newsletters etc). Are there any recommendations for the kind of specs a box like this should have? Thanks Evan Morris evan@exclusivebooks.com Tel: +27 11 792 2777 Fax: +27 11 792 2711 Cell: +27 82 926 3630
On Tuesday 03 December 2002 3:29 am, Evan Morris wrote:
Hi
I know this is slightly OT, but I'd appreciate any responses.
I intend to set up a box running SUSE, sendmail, and probably something like Majordomo. The sole purpose of the box will be to act as a mailing list server. All the mailing lists will be announcement lists, sending out about 100 000 messages a month (email newsletters etc). Are there any recommendations for the kind of specs a box like this should have?
Well, working this "backards", to deliver any number of messages in 30 days means you have roughly 43,000 minutes to deliver them (30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes); to deliver 100,000 messages, you have slightly less than 30 seconds each. Assuming (for the moment) a typical "home" environment (though a "high-speed" home using cable or DSL) and an outbound rate of 128kbits/second, I *think* you are limited to 300k bytes/message -- if your newsletters are larger than this, no amount of hardware will help [of course, if you are lucky enough to have a higher outbound rate, say for instance a "real" T1 line, this wont' be a "limitation" for you. Assuming a far more "sane" message size of 3k bytes [or, at worse, 30k for a daily "digest"] means you can take a leisurely 3 seconds apiece per message -- most liklely, this is still within the capabilities of even the oldest hardware that can still run linux...
On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 01:29:34PM +0200, evan@exclusivebooks.com wrote:
I intend to set up a box running SUSE, sendmail, and probably something like Majordomo. The sole purpose of the box will be to act as a mailing list server. All the mailing lists will be announcement lists, sending out about 100 000 messages a month (email newsletters etc). Are there any recommendations for the kind of specs a box like this should have?
This is a pretty easy job. Something like a Pentium with a few hundred MHz should be able to cope well. Expect to add a new HD, as if you buy second-hand, it'll probably come with a tiny one. If you're considering using Mailman instead of Majordomo, make sure you've got a reasonable amount of memory - say 64 MB or more. I had a DX2/66 running Mailman in only 32 MB, and whenever I dialled up to my ISP, the machine used to die - the default configuration is to run a list servicing script every minute, and the machine was so bogged down with swapping as it handled incoming mail, that the list servicing script took more than a minute to run, and I'd end up with more and more copies of this script running, which would eventually kill the machine. If you can stretch to 128 MB (it's so cheap nowadays, after all), you'll have lots of memory for caching the disk, which should help speed up the spooling. Of course, YMMV - if your 'newsletters' are 100 MB each, you'll need a really beefy machine (or even better, a strong thwack with a ClueBat...). HTH... -- David Smith Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com STMicroelectronics Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk Bristol, England GPG Key: 0xF13192F2
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