[Techtalk] Unusually high loads w/sendmail

[Scott]

Hi Gang-

I had a BSDi server, originally a Pentium 100 with 64 megs of ram serving 
2,300 email accounts via sendmail and qpopper.  This machine also handled 
user home pages and radius.  It crashed a little over a week ago......I 
was hoping to go Debian, but in the interest of getting up as soon as 
possible I grabbed Red Hat 7.2 and installed, up in 29 minutes.

Machine config:  Dual PIII, 600 MHz, gig of ram, raid 5.  Install Red Hat 
7.2 with sendmail, qpopper, OpenWebMail, apache and Spam Assassin's spamd 
daemon.  My load averages are hitting 6 on average, dropping to 2 or 3 
late at night.  The machine is overloaded, customers call and their 
Outlooks time out, some even give the error that xinetd is refusing the 
connection.

Needless to say I am very disappointed that a RH machine with this horse 
power can not even handle what BSDi did on a Pentium 100.  I did disable 
spamd and makes no difference.

My question:  would Debian serve me better or any other thoughts?  

TIA

-Scott