MS Performance

[Joel Colvin]

I measure performance by watching the sendmail delay field.  If you look at
the final delivery of the message, the delay field shows total time from
first receipt until delivered locally or to another server.  Consequently,
delay time shows total time to process through MS, SA and any Virus checks.
I only look at messages delivered to my own mail server and ignore outbound
mail.  I have several MS servers, some doing virus checks and some not and I
chart the Average Delay time. (See attached .bmp)

I am alerted when the average time to process goes over a threshold.  On the
system with the included chart, I get alerts when the average time exceeds
45 seconds.  From this chart, you can see that I run about 7 seconds per
message.  I size a system based on this number and the peak messages per
second that I anticipate.  My largest system peaks at about 1.5 messages per
second and has an average delay time of 9 seconds.

Watching this time, total memory and CPU performance is how I finally solved
my performance problems of two months ago.  Knowing your peak messages per
second is critical to sizing some of the batch variables in MS.

Joel

P.S. I generate this data with a heavily modified version of David While's
Mailstats.


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