Hi Ali,

Your requirement is very specific and definitely needs some testing to see
if it is compatible with the way IMail works. Sending all mail to the same
user in IMail means continually appending and manipulating one mailbox file.
I can see this as being a major bottleneck compared to handling the same
amount of mail to lots of individual accounts. Just imagine what happens
when the 30 or more SMTP processes are all trying to local deliver to the
same large file at the same time. Far too much concurrency for my mind. If
you do use Imail, definitely get a good RAID controller that has lots of
memory like a Mylex 250 or 1100 as these tend help alot with these types of
concurrency issues.

IMail works in the same way as many of the standard unix mail server in this
respect and a core part of the single mailbox design seems to be to preserve
file system space as on most filesystems individual small files are much
less space efficient than large files containing the same data. Basically
this works out as a compromise because large files are bad for concurrency
whereas lots of files are bad as they use about 1kb FAT space each on top of
the  space on the file system. Having said that NTFS (post SP6a) seems to be
well geared to handling lots of files.

There are a couple of alternatives (IIS SMTP for one, especially w2k) which
store their data in individual files and may or may not be more suitable. 

Just my �.02 worth.

Cheers

Steve 

Steven Moore
Internet Development Engineer
Research Machines
+44 1235 823522 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Ali Port
Sent: 04 September 2000 17:57
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [IMail Forum] Real life throughput?



Does anybody have any real world statistics on the throughput of incoming
mail using IMail.  Maybe even hazard a good 'well we get this' type number.

I've seen the KB article that states IMail can handle 250,000 2K messages in
a day on a dual Pentium 120MHz with 64Mb RAM.  Our server is a bit better
than that (dual Pentium III 500MHz 256Mb RAM) but we would want to receive a
lot more messages.  It would only be for receiving mail and all messages
would go to the same account (probably from a few external accounts).
However we would be talking about millions of <1Kb messages a day.  We would
then use a server based mail control to pull them out of the mailbox.

Anyone think IMail is up to the task or know of any mail server that is?

Cheers for any info.

Ali.

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