[Dovecot] Sizing MTA servers

[Frerich Raabe]

On 2014-01-17 10:53, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 1/16/2014 6:56 PM, Murray Trainer wrote:
>
>> This is probably a bit off-topic but does anyone have any idea about
>> sizing MTA servers.   We have about 200,000 emails/hr  incoming and
>> outgoing.  I am intending using Exim and Spamassassin on each MTA.
>> How many servers using recent hardware would I need to cope with 
>> this
>> mail throughput?
>
> The number of boxen is irrelevant to the question of msg rate, as is 
> the
> CPU.  You can easily do your 56 msgs/sec with one box containing a 10
> year old 2GHz single core CPU, as long as you have enough memory for 
> the
> concurrent TCP connections, and sufficient IOPS.  The only thing in 
> this
> scenario needing CPU is spamassassin, unless you forgot to mention 
> clamav.

[..]

Stan, I just wanted to mention that even though I didn't ask the 
question
(nor is the answer to it relevant to me in practice, right now) I 
greatly
appreciated your elaborate response and the insight. It's pearls like 
this
one which keep me on the list despite the occasional flamewar. ;-)

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing