Makes me amazed at the machines that people have to run mail anymore.
My company mail server is a p75, 32M, 2G IDE
I have only 30 users but alot of throughput, never had any problems with
queuing or ever had to reboot for any reason other than a kernel update.
Maybe I should run some benchmarks just to show how great qmail is on a
piece of dirt machine.
-----Original Message-----
From: Cris Daniluk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, August 06, 1999 4:31 PM
To: QMail
Subject: Performance
Well, we're starting into our testing of qmail so that we can transition
away from the garbage-polluted ms smtp server that we had such a long thread
about earlier this week.
Basically, we constructed a temporary system for benchmarking. It is a dual
p2 400 with a dpt smartraid5 controller and 64mb cache. We put in 2 9.1gb
cheetahs on a raid 0 stripe. The system has 160mb ram.
The first benchmark we ran was to see how fast we could populate the queue.
I made a script to sequentially fill the queue with 20kb messages. It was
able to do 2000 20kb messages in approximately 16 seconds (precision was
only to the second, so 15.1-16.9 are valid ranges). 125 messages per second
is more than adequate for our needs. I was very impressed by the fact that
qmail could populate the queue so quickly. I think that definitely goes to
show the scalability of qmail.
The next test we're going to do is to use it as a mail relay, relaying from
the message generator machines out to the net. For the short term, we are
going to run 4 separate qmails with 4 separate queues. Each instance will be
on a separate ip, though. What needs to be done to qmail to make it bind to
a specific IP? This is pretty vital that we bind to separate ips because
eventually we will be putting in 4 network cards (one for each queue).
To further increase our hardware aresenal, once we find the optimal
performance setup, we're going to build 5 of them. We'll have 5 machines
generating mail, 5 sending, and we hope to be able to send upward of 10
million or more per day. At that time we'll also have a 256mb cache on the
raid controller so that the queue can run much more efficiently.
I think that everyone on the qmail list deserves a big thanks from all of us
for the valuable information and insight. It appears that qmail will be a
successful solution for us, and ironically, thousands of dollars cheaper
than the Big Hardware Big Software microsoft solution that we were using
before.
Once we get the network cards in and binded, we'll be on our way to a
wonderful solution...
Cris Daniluk
MicroStrategy
