[Mailman-Users] Getting Started

[Rick Robino]

Amen, Barry. I have similar experiences with a Sparc 5 (not a sun4u
either!) which proved the box and the OS to be quite capable, handling
a very high load of Internet traffic for mail and web. Even when it
gets loaded, it might slow down a bit but it keeps chugging. I can't
say I've run Solaris 7 in this environment yet, just 2.5.1 and 2.6.

With any Unix there are a couple kernel parameters you might want to
tune, especially if the box runs an HTTP server, is as high-traffic as
you say, and probably has longer than LAN latency times. There are two
great books for Solaris on the subject, "Sun Performance and Tuning",
by Adrian Cockroft and Richard Pettit; and "Configuration and Capacity
Planning for Solaris Servers", by Brian Wong. Solaris 2.6 had much
better defaults and upper limits than previous releases, and Solaris 7
should be even better. They can all be changed on the fly and don't
need a reboot. Just be careful, and test what you change to see if
it really works the way you want.

I hope I can avoid a holy war, I haven't tried OpenBSD, but I do like
and have some experience with FreeBSD and BSDi. I figure besides the
whole SysV vs BSD thing, most people know the good parts and bad parts
of each system. In my take, I like the innovations that have come along
in recent *BSD flavors and some of the networking stuff, but to me
having a real SPARC chip, UPA board, and solid SCSI still take
precedence over other arguements. Thats why I like Solaris. My $0.02.

--Rick



> On Fri, Jul 09, 1999 at 07:50:03PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "JS" == Jeff Schneiter <jschneit at Adobe.COM> writes:
> 
>     JS> Do you think that Solaris will be slim and fast enough
>     JS> to work with this, or should I use the nice small OpenBSD?
> 
> We run all python.org mailing lists (and that's many high volume lists
> like python-list at python.org <-> comp.lang.python) on a piddly little
> Sparc5 running Solaris 2.6.  Okay, we jammed 256MB into it, and the
> fastest-widest-scsi-est :) controller and disk we could get, but other
> than that there's nothing special about the machine.  And with the
> current CVS snapshot (or rc3 which /could/ be out tonight if I'm
> lucky), performance is looking very good.
> 
> -Barry
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Mailman-Users maillist  -  Mailman-Users at python.org
> http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users

-- 
                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rick Robino                                  mailto:rrobino at wavedivision.com