mailscanner/spamassassin strangeness

Quentin Campbell Q.G.Campbell at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK
Wed Jan 30 14:00:45 GMT 2002


> >However it is recognised here that MailScanner and uvscan (and
> >SpamAssassin) are essential tools so we will be able to upgrade the 
> >platforms (currently  400MHz Ultra-5_10's with 384MB) once we have 
> >identified suitable hardware.
> 
> How many messages per day do you process on an Ultra 5? I 
> would be interested to hear what the maximum load is that an 
> Ultra 5 can take.

Julian

We run sendmail-8.10.1 on all five of our Ultra-5_10 Mail Hubs.

If you look at the output from the "mailstats" command and sum the total
of messages IN and the total of messages OUT the figure is 500,000+
messages a _week_ on each of our two busiest Mail Hubs.

The corresponding volume of message data processed on these two Hubs is
14GB+ a week (split roughly 50/50 between messages IN/OUT). 

If I have done my sums correctly it would appear that, if the average
message size is about 25K, an Ultra-5 in the configuration described
above is struggling when the _daily_ load is in excess of about 75,000
messages IN/OUT (*).


(*) Since this is an aggregate figure we use the term "message
    transactions" as the measure of how busy our Mail Hubs are.
    Each Mail Hub also has an old mail list expander on it which
    handle some legacy mail lists and this adds to the processing
    load very slightly.

 
Quentin
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PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Computing Service, University of Newcastle
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