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