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I'd second that. Things may have changed recently, but historically, Linux hasn't been a great platform for mail servers because of the file system semantics. (Linux systems can get very ~weird~ under heavy email loads, kinda the way that Windows systems get ~weird~ in everyday desktop operations.)

Solaris is very good, and the x-BSDs often do better if you're a free software fanatic.

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I don't understand. Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'weird' and why the BSD's do better?

It has to do with the way fsync works and metadata updates on directories. Linux does a lot more work updating directories, which hurts performance on mail servers in general but really hurts with qmail.

Practically you might find your CPU utilization is 2%, but the load average is 50 and you do 'ls' on a directory that has 20 files in in it and it takes 30 seconds.

Huh, thanks! Now I finally know why the hell that happened.

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