Performance

[Keith Floyd]

Hi

I have a D-class running sendmail - as a mail relay and its also running DNS

I want to understand how the following may affect this

File Handles
Inodes
Swap
Buffer cache

Does anyone have any ideas ???


Thanks

Keith

[James R. Ferguson]

Keith:

Glance is an excellent tool for performance measurement. It has built-in help that gives an idea of what the metric means.

...JRF...

[Victor BERRIDGE]

try uptime, top, vmstat and look at sar.
Like already mentioned you could get glance on free trial for I think 60 or 90 days, dont quite remember

[John Palmer]

Keith,

System performance and tuning is a complicated subject.

You might consider attending HP's course, it's very good.

[Rick Garland]

The performance metrics you mentioned can be obtained through sar. Glance also can do this but is a purchased product.

Do a man sar. The /usr/lbin/sa/sa1 and /usr/lbin/sa/sa2 commands can help you collect data periodically and do the conversion from binary to text readable files. There are options (switches) with the sa2 command that allows you to be specific about what stats you are wishing to view.

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

All of HP's internal email servers run Openmail and sendmail as the realy and we dont really have any performance setup for sendmail itself, its not that intensive. DNS (named process) is however, a rather hungry daemon, so we dont run sendmail and dns on the same server - we moved dns off to its own server. Sendmail itself doesnt really need any particular kernel parameters set for it, just make sure you are using some buffer cache as it helps performance generally (eg. our K460's with 2Gb ram run around 500 Mb buffer cache), nfile should be set to a few thousand to avoid any problems, swap should generally be from the size of pysical ram to double it, and file handles arent really an issue.

If really depends how busy your server is going to be. If its not going to be that busy then you dont really need any specail setup for it.