Load test

[Julian Field]

At 13:17 18/02/2003, you wrote:
>Apologies as this might be slightly off topic
>
>I'm looking for a tool to test the mail processing power of a system.
>
>The ideal tool would send a configurable amount of mails per second/minute
>with randomly attached files, viruses aswell as allowed and disallowed
>files, to a mailbox.
>
>I'm fairly confident this would be easily achived with perl or some script,
>unfortunatly my coding skills are not the best...
>
>Does anyone know if such a tool exists?
>
>regards, Tony

I use a test set of real messages collected using the "Archive Mail"
feature. Controlling the speed of the incoming messages is something I
haven't got sorted out at all yet. I use a little perl script on host 1 to
squirt messages at the MailScanner host 2. My script does have some very
simple speed control, but I haven't found the control much use yet. I
usually just need to go as fast as  possible. I then have a very minimal
SMTP "sink" server process on host 3 to receive all the mail that
MailScanner on host 2 sends out. It just talks SMTP and throws away all the
messages it is sent.

This way you can get some figures that include the network load of the
messages coming in and out, which is quite important.

With my current tests I am hitting disk speed bottlenecks (using Ultra 160
SCSI Seagate Cheetah disk), seems to be maxing out at about 15Mbytes/s write.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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