One of the things that I am considering is hosting a number of mailing
lists, but I'm not sure of the bandwidth impact. Now I can assume that an
average message is X bytes, that an average list has Y subscribers, and
that it will have an average of Z messages/day, and run the totals, but
that really doesn't give me a good "real-world" estimate of the bandwidth
necessities, especially of peak bandwidth.
So, if I were to decide that I wanted to allocate 512k of my bandwidth
for mailing list purposes, what sort of load could I realistically expect
to handle?
Some preliminary testing of mine gave fairly mediocre numbers. A
program of mine sent 190 messages as fast as it could, to various
domains/users. The program finished in 14 seconds, and watching the logs,
it took 30 to 45 seconds to deliver all messages that it could to remote
servers. If I were to take that as indicative, I would say that it could
deliver (60 * 200) = 12,000 messages/hour without problems. That means
that if an average list had 300 subscribers, and I have 40 lists, then I'm
looking at ten messages/hour to each list. Averaged out, that would be 240
messages/day (not too bad), but realistically I know that most all traffic
will be concentrated during a part of the day...
Any info would be appreciated.
steve
