RFC: calculating scan times for messages.

[Mariano Absatz]

El 5 Mar 2003 a las 13:57, David escribió:

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> Hello.
> 
> I was wondering if any of you have an idea how I could time the
> scanning process for a message.
> 
> I am using sendmail and I was thinking about using the delay= data, but
> that would not be too accurate.
> What I actually wish to do is for a private littkle project of mine.
> 
> I would ike to estimate the following:
> 
> With the checks XX used and sophos, using Spamassassin with checks XXX
> 
> scanning a 500byte message takes and avergae of XX seconds (and so on)
> 
> Does this make sense at all?
Well... not that it doesn't make sense, but it wouldn't be measuring anything 
too useful...

The point is that you can't extrapolate useful info from that data... In 
order to measure something useful, you should have to bomb your server with a 
good mixture of mails including spam, ham and viruses and keep an eye on the 
queues... once you have steadily growing queues you should make a couple of 
marks in the logs and measure the number of messages per time unit that are 
passing thru MailScanner.

That should give you a rough estimate of performance... it doesn't make too 
much sense to measure how much does any specific message takes.

Note that you need at least 3 machines to do this... the actual test machine, 
an emisor machine and a receptor machine.

The test machine should be configured to route all its outgoing mail to the 
receptor machine. The receptor machine should have a very fast mail server 
configured to accept and delete every message inconditionally (kind of, your 
incoming mail queue should be /dev/null :-)

The emisor machine is the hardest... maybe you'll have to hack a small fast 
program to send the mail. Or you can take something like qmail (which I think 
sends 1 message per session even though they may be going to the same place), 
stop the smtp client, fill the outgoing queue with your very large collection 
mixing spam, ham and virus e-mails and... start the smtp client.

It might be a funny process and I would definitively like to have the outcome 
from that if you do it... maybe also the programs/configuration used.

For the client smtp (the emisor) you might also want to take a look at Russel 
Cocker's postal http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ (the receptor machine is what 
he calls SMTP sink, if you do it, I guess he'll be glad to know about it).

Postal generates garbage for the mail data, but maybe you can modify it so it 
takes the messages from somewhere. It has a nice set of options for number of 
simultaneous connections, max number of messages per connection, max message 
size, rate limitation, etc.



--
Mariano Absatz
El Baby
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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice;
but in practice, there is a great deal of difference.