[CentOS] Piranha vs HAProxy vs Something else

Mon Feb 11 06:25:37 UTC 2008
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com