Good news for me, bad news for everyone else, I have an amicable solution for handling bandwidth tracking on the new servers. Instead of going the cumbersome method of writing an Apache module to track bandwidth, I will be taking a page from cPanel’s book and just writing traffic to a flat file. Every night at approximately 3 AM a script will reconcile the bandwidth logs and dump it into the database. There is a marginal hit on filesystem performance, but again this is a far better solution than Ensim’s cumbersome configuration file parsing, plus we will still be able to retain the rapid Web server restarts that we have all grown to appreciate and love.
Currently, the script to parse and dump the logs into the database is being written and should be live no later than Saturday morning.
IMAP/POP3 and SSH traffic are negligible. Dedicated port traffic will be next on the list of problems to solve… possibly with some iptables packet counting.
– Matt