ON Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 01:48:48PM -0600, Joel Rosenberg wrote: 
> 
> http://www.mosix.org) might be a better, if a bit bleeding-edge choice, 
> particularly if the process is going to be processor-bound, rather than I/O 
> bound, as that scales up in an obvious sort of way -- just add on more nodes 
> if things start to slow down.  You're probably going to want SCSI and some 
> sort of RAID -- some of the performance data I've seen for RAID-5 suggests 
> that you really don't take much of a performance hit vs. RAID-1 as one would 
> intuitively think.  

It'll be disk I/O bound. If reliability isn't a requirement, he can do 
striping (RAID-0) or multiple queues over multiple disks. For RAID I would 
look at mirrored stripe sets (RAID 1+0) using software RAID.

> My entirely unexpert guess is that pretty much any high-performance *nix box 
> is going to have little or no trouble keeping up with the kind of load you're 
> talking about, particularly if you're using postfix, which has the reputation 
> of giving better performance than sendmail.  

Anything, in my experience, is better than sendmail. qmail and postfix are two.

-- 
Michael