MS Performance

[Joel Colvin]

David, I'll send you a copy and explain my changes.  I probably won't have
time for a couple days but I'll send it and you can decide if any of my mods
are worth adding.

Joel

-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of David While
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 2:35 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: MS Performance

Could you let me have a copy - I will look at incorporating into the
main version. Seems useful to me.

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David While
Technical Development Manager
Faculty of Computing, Information & English
University of Central England
Tel: 0121 331 6211
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-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Colvin [mailto:joelc at CTCHOUSTON.COM]
Sent: 09 July 2003 19:49
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: MS Performance


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.