Recommended setup for a server that sends millions of emails monthly

[olegbliaher]

Hi there, I'm currently migrating a (non-dockerized) Postal v2 production server to Postal v3. As of today, that server is sending millions of emails monthly, and it's working really good.

I wonder if anyone here has some advice for how to configure the Postal v3 servern now that the workers have changed?

I'm mostly curious about the worker threads, main_db pool_size and perhaps some innodb-tweaks (innodb_buffer_pool_size, innodb_log_file_sizeetc).

Edit: I found the following recommendations in #324:

[mysqld]
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
max_connections = 500
wait_timeout = 31536000
max_allowed_packet = 256M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

Today I have about 20 Postal workers. I noticed that 20 worker threads aren't that much in Postal v3.

Edit 2: I also found this info in #2879:

services:
  worker:
    deploy:
      replicas: 4

Imagine I have endless resources, what would be my safest bet for multiple Postal organizations and servers sending tons of emails at the same time? Should I let the thread count be 2?

[willpower232]

Today I have about 20 Postal workers

if you have 20 Postal workers showing up when you do postal status, you probably want to scale to the same number in the docker-compose.yml file you end up using. The deploy syntax you found seems to be the way.

I believe it is easier to configure the scaled count of workers than it is to increase the thread count so I would probably start there and work backwards. That being said, the original worker seemed to use 4 threads by default so perhaps once you have completed the move, you may find there is some adjusting to be done. Fundamentally, you know how many workers and how many threads you're using currently so it seems you can use the same numbers in v3.

Regarding the database, I don't think you need to change any extra settings than what it has currently. If you're moving databases then you'll want to make sure any changes you've made to the configuration are also copied across.

[olegbliaher]

Thanks for the answer @willpower232!

I just want to follow-up and say that 16 workers (replicas: 16) in Postal v3 with 2 threads/worker have given me much better results than 20 of them with 4 threads/worker in Postal v2.

And I don't think it's the thread configuration. Postal v3 is just way faster.