Interested in hearing from anyone using SFE with a few hundred domains. Wanted to compare notes and see what your performance is like.

Thanks!

Not running a few hundred - but...

Running about 50 domains with SFE
~3000 users
~400000 emails per day
~25-40 concurrent connections
MSSQL 2000 - Win2003 Server
Running on a single Quad Core Xeon @2.4Ghz with 4GB RAM
mem and Virt mem are both ~850MB
CPU usage usually less than 10%

PM me if you 'd like more info.

jerbo128

Note that it takes about 3 minutes to load 300 domains. Probably take 10-13 or more for that many domains. Have a powerful box for that many domains. Have your db on a separate server

Can't believe you had that many on SFI. How big was your autowhitelistforcedelivery.txt file?

Other than that its been working just great. We have 2 SFE's to split the load and for redunadancy. SFE has surpassed all my expections with the excellent support of Roberto. I ran into a few minor issues initally but he fixed them all and now everything is great.

We created scripts to update our tblAuthorizedTo list and also have scripts to update the Autowhitelistforcedelivery with entries from our outbound mail server. Totally automated! The ability to use SQL code to update everything instead of text files is truly wonderful.

One nice thing that you can do is copy your existing spamfilter directory into a new directory and bring up the exe. There you can go thru the upgrade procedure while your production SFI is still cranking away. You can make sure everything is 100% before you shutdown your production server and convert it over.

Roberto,
   Maybe you should sticky the instructions for a painless upgrade like the ones you sent me which worked extremely well.

LogSat wrote: Atif, For comparison, we just tested SFE on a laptop (the machine I have available right now) with a single Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz CPU, running both SFE and SQL. SFE started up in just about 60 seconds with slightly over 200 domains.

Yeah, 60 seconds, but does each of the 200 domains have over 8,000 entries in the tblbl_keywords and do you have over 350k entries in your autowhitelist table.  

I guess its all relative, but you will need some ponies with 20+K domains.

I love SFE and glad we 'talked' Roberto and his team into writing it.

atifghaffar,

   I was just wondering how big some of your files must have been getting with that much data.

  Like yourself we also use SpamAssassin after our primary SFE's feeding into a second instance on one of the SFE's that checks for specific keywords and quarantines the email if found. It would have been nice to have SA incorporated inside of SFE, but in retrospect it makes more sense to use it as a final filter after SFE has done all the heavy lifting since SA is so very CPU intensive. Having SA check on each email would really require a lot of horsepower.

  I think you'll like SFE, but make sure the db is solid.

atifghaffar,

 Same o Same o.

Thats why I said you needed a solid db. Doing the upgrade as Roberto described did not mess with my production SFI because there was no actual traffic going to the copied spamfilter directory that I was using to do the upgrade. Was a little hesitant about that and it took Roberto a couple of trys to convince me that I wouldn't screw my production system even though I was upgrading the same database my production system was using. A little unnerving at first but he was right. You can switch back and for between SFE and SFI and each system would be independant of the other. Pretty good design in that regard.