On Sep 3, 2012, at 03:56, Viktor Dukhovni wrote: > On Sun, Sep 02, 2012 at 07:14:35PM +0100, Sam Jones wrote: > >> I guess what I'm querying in a way is some of the sales blurb from >> people like PowerMTA & GreenArrow and the remarks they make about open >> source solutions like Postfix etc. This one in particular: "Open source >> Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) often max out between 20 and 30 thousand >> messages per hour. GreenArrow can send 300,000 messages per hour?more >> than ten times as fast." > > As I said, I measured 300 msgs/sec with Postfix on relatively modest > hardware in 2003. This is not too difficult, just configure sufficient > output concurrency, and provide a low latency disk (battery cache > striped RAID). > > With RAM disk (a queue-manager bottleneck analysis, circa five > years ago) Postfix yielded ~3000 msgs/sec on a dual Opteron box > delivering to the discard transport. So that's your ceiling if you > provide sufficient disk and network bandwidth, eventually the queue > manager runs out of CPU, but this is at rates approaching 10 million > messages an hour. > > The throughput numbers are not that interesting anymore, I go for > reliability, security and flexibility. I also go for a solid > architecture that degrades well under load, and that's why I > really like Postfix, but this is a difficult point to make, > most people are not in a position to understand why Postfix > stands out in this regard.
In other words, if 'we strip this back to hypothetical and assume a perfect world without any issues', this 'GreenArrow' maxes out at 300,000 messages per hour. Postfix can send 10,8 million messages per hour, more than 35 times as fast*. Lies, damn lies, and vendor benchmarks, heh. Cya, Jona -- * Tests performed in an optimized lab environment. Operational restrictions may apply in real world environments.
