Les Mikesell wrote:
Christopher Chan wrote:
Haha. Yes, I know that more and more appliances are getting Linux
based control systems but I am certainly very interested in how they
got a box running a 2.4 version of Linux to perform like what I saw. I
had upgraded the mailservers of the company to get a bit more
performance by moving to 2.6 but F5 runs a 2.4.x Linux kernel and has
a single box perform better than a cluster of the mailservers I
upgraded to 2.6?!
What do they have in those boxes? ASICs doing smtp and dns that
somehow create zero network latency? What patches do they have in
their souped up sccp version?
F5 is known more for load balancing than mail servers so I'm not sure
what you saw, but if you were throwing hardware at mail server
performance the first thing to add would be battery-backed RAM on the
disk/raid controllers so you don't have to wait for disk head motion to
complete when the mail application fsync's each write.
Okay, so those mailservers in the cluster did not have 3ware 955x
controllers. In fact, they use linux md. There was one box that did have
such a controller and had BBU cache RAM (10 disks attached in RAID5
mode). That box still did not do anything near what the F5 box did. One
of the F5 guys did say that the cache of the RAID controller of the F5
box was involved in the mail queue guarantee but he also said something
about the filesystem layer being bypassed...ah well.
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