[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, March 24, 2002 at 18:04:57 (+1100), Scott Howard wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] thoughts on SMTP
>
> One of our two (load balancing) external mail servers for Friday :
> 
> 00:00:00    %usr    %sys    %wio   %idle
> 09:00:02      33      20       2      45
> 09:10:01      22      17       2      58
> 09:20:00      28      22       3      48
> 09:30:01      30      26       3      41
> 09:40:00      33      27       2      38
> 09:50:01      28      18       2      51
> 10:00:00      28      16       2      54
> 10:10:00      16      14       3      68
> 10:20:00      21      22       5      53
> 10:30:01      39      28       3      30
> 10:40:01      55      44       0       1
> 10:50:00      38      28       2      31
> 
> (2x Ultra 1-170's, 512Mb memory, moving a few gigs of mail _each_ per days)

Something doesn't match up here.  You've got quite a strange load there.

Let me guess:  software RAID -- or some other non-SMTP related processing.

(even so you've got a lot of idle cycles too -- I'll bet you could use a
decent low-CPU implementation of a streaming compression algorithm on
all the SMTP traffic without hitting 100% CPU except in very peak time
periods)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>