After I figured out what was causing the problems with multiple messages slowing each other down on the system things have been working wonderfully. So well in fact that I don’t see the need to replace the current hardware in the near future. I’m hoping that adding more hardware will be necessary, but that will only be to handle additional loads.
There are currently 5 permanent servers running SFE, three dual PII’s and two P4 with lots of RAM between them. The database server that runs SFE and many of my other sites is a Dual P4 Xeon with 4GB of RAM. With this current configuration my statics say that I could process more then 450 times the spam messages that I currently am each day and I suspect that number will hold true for a while.
Thanks to Elang, it is easy to add more nodes into the system, it can be done in less then 15 minutes per server. In fact each server can easily handle 6 nodes, possible more if I wanted to. Each node is capable of handling more then 13,500 messages a day and that number is only going up for the next week or so.
I still have a few things that I need to work out before letting too many more people onto SFE. I am hoping to have the major issues resolved soon and then just work on the small or more cosmetic issues.
My current goal is to start letting people sign up for themselves to be part of the extended BETA testing (which will be free) before the first of April.
The Extended BETA test will still have the system working out some bugs and the bigger thing is that I will need more samples of good email messages. Once I see the neutral message accounting for less them 5% (It is currently just less then 20%) of the total message for more then 1 week then I will feel confidant that the system is good enough to charge money for 