Hello All,
I'm considering putting together a few documents for IMail
performance best practicies and would like to get some ideas from all of you on
what would be of most use to everyone in the group (since I'll be relying
heavily on all of you to contribute performance metrics).
This effort is inspired by the lack of documented information
on the Ipswitch IMail product itself (from Ipswitch or independent
sources). I've seen several posts on asking what type of performance to
expect from the software, and with what hardware configurations, as
I have been there myself many times. The aim is to help people avoid
the catch-22 problem of not knowing how to properly size new installations of
IMail.
Any information obtained will be made openly available.
While this may eventually turn into a semi-dedicated website,
I hope to at least start by targeting the following subjects:
1) What are the largest / larger known implementations of
IMail? What are the associated software & hardware
configurations? I hope to create a website where people can enter this
information in with as little effort as possible.
2) What is the best way to conceptually measure the
performance of various components of an IMail Server? Specifically what
metrics determine the actual performance of a system and what factors should be
considered for determining performance bottlenecks and threshholds (processor /
network / memory / io utilization, user response time, SMTP delivery time,
messages processed per minute / day, external user databases, etc.)
3) What is the best approach to actually monitoring and
reporting IMail system performance, using **free** tools, to get an accurate and
consistant baseline? How can this process be mechanized to the point where
anyone can collect and submit system performance information? What factors
need to be considered in comparing against other hardware
configurations?
If some of the developers out there could write / recommend a
cheap stress-test tool to test various IMail services (POP, SMTP, IMAP, WEB),
I'd be happy to run it against different hardware platforms with a standardized
configuration of IMail. If this tool could be written generically enough,
it could be used for many different types of mail systems (sourceforge
anyone?).
So... until I can actually make progress on a site to host any
of this, please help by emailing me directly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to answer any or all of
the following questions (cc the forum list if you want to start an open
discussion on a particular request):
a) What performance monitoring techniques and software
do you currently use (particularly helpful from those with larger
environments)?
b) What type of information would you like to see on a
best-practices performance guide?
c) Is there anything that you would be willing to
contribute on any of the 3 items listed above?
d) If you are running a highly-available or redundant
solution with IMail, please let me know so I can collect the different methods
currently being used to achieve this.
Thank you for your time,
Ives
