Benchmarking

[Jim Levie]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 15:35, Thomas DuVally wrote:
> Hi all,
>         Anyone know of a good way to benchmark a mailserver?  We are getting
> ready to implement Sendmail/Mailscanner/SpamAssassin and would like to
> have some numbers that tell us how it's goind to perform before we put
> it in.
>         We think we know how we can load test it: Make it a relay just for the
> ORBS and MAPS domains and submit it for testing.  Once it gets posted we
> can watch the spam start flying.  But we want something a little more
> controlled.
>
I don't know that I've ever looked for a specific application to do load
tests, but I can tell you how I do it. I've got a collection of qf/df
pairs that I gathered from traffic through a real server. There's some
15K messages (~350Mb) in my sample and approximately half is spam. I use
a perl script to feed the messages into MailScanners Incoming Queue Dir
at what ever rate I want. MailScanner does its thing and drops the
result into the Outgoing Queue DIR. The queue dirs aren't known to
sendmail, so it remains out of the loop and all I see is the performance
of MailScanner.

I don't see any point in including Sendmail in the test since there are
so many unknowns in mail traffic. It's easy enough to watch the load and
how many messages are being processed per unit of time when you have
control of the message input rate. And by working with a fixed set of
messages you have predictable behaviour of MailScanner over the set.
With a live mail feed the content and percentage of spam varies greatly.
--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
   Jim Levie                                 email:
jim at entrophy-free.net