What harddrive to use for new Gamera Server?

TheEniGMa · Unread post by **TheEniGMa** » Tue May 06, 2008 8:43 am

Hello.

I got a new server based on a Intel server board along with a Quad Xeon @ 2.5Ghz and 4GB FB DDR2. Both CPU power and memory will be usefull for spamassassin I guess.

But what about harddrive(s) and how HDD intensive is Gamera? Do a single 7200RPM SATA drive do or shall I set up a RAID-0 / RAID-5 for faster read/write speeds. Is a WD Raptor at 10.000 RPM (with al lot faster random access times) woth the extra cash in a Gamera server or are the hard drive usage so low that it really doesn´t matter what I use?

Thanks.

Unread post by **scott** » Tue May 06, 2008 4:32 pm

Its mostly memory and CPU cache, so that would make a really high-end PG box. You shouldn't have trouble handling millions of messages on that system.

Disk IO wont be that big of a deal, a 0+1 would give you the best performance. Avoid the RAID-5, or any configuration involving parity generation.

TheEniGMa · Unread post by **TheEniGMa** » Fri May 09, 2008 4:10 am

Thanks Scott.

I'll simply go with a RAID-1 of two SATA 10K RPM 36GB Raptor discs. If transfer speeds aren't that important, at least the faster access times might be useful on a busy system (?!).

Unread post by **scott** » Fri May 09, 2008 9:01 am

Oh yeah that sounds like you'll have a very quick system. Its going to make a lot of very small disk read/writes, so anything you do to optimize that speed the better. Like setting the noatime flag in /etc/fstab for example.

TheEniGMa · Unread post by **TheEniGMa** » Fri May 09, 2008 12:26 pm

I have been running the system for just a few days now (with a single standard 7200RPM SATA-drive) and during the last 24h it´s been handling 200.000 mails without any problem. I will kill another Gamera-server running on P4 3Ghz and point those mails onto this system as well...

Will also install two Western Digital Raptor drives (access time 4,2ms instead of regular SATA drive that has ~8ms) and try the noatime in fstab to see if I can speed it up just a little bit more. If I understand you correct and RAID-10 won´t really improve things with Gamera since it´s only very "small data" that´s beeing read/write?

Scott, anything else you can recomend to get the optimal config for Gamera? Use mySQL for bayes?

Unread post by **scott** » Fri May 09, 2008 12:43 pm

A RAID 0+1 is the optimal performance configuration. A RAID-10 is something completely different (and far slower). You really dont need to bother though, unless you're trying to handle millions of messages a day.

Mysql Bayes is covered here:
http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/Project_Gamera

TheEniGMa · Unread post by **TheEniGMa** » Fri May 09, 2008 1:46 pm

Sweet, thanks =)