The reason why I asked was-->(Re: RFC: calculating scan times for messages.)

[Julian Field]

At 17:14 05/03/2003, you wrote:
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> >Running MailScanner, Sophos, SpamAssassin (2.44 or 2.50, it doesn't
>matter much) and 3 RBL's, the MailScanner can do about 1.5 million
> >messages per day. Just running MailScanner and SpamAssassin, it can
>handle 4.4 million per day.
>>
>>In case you are interested, I have attached a little zip file
>>containing the emisor test "harness"(and the shell script that runs
>>them in parallel) and the smtp sink. <SpeedTests.zip>--
>
>Thank you very much. It is no real secret, but I am looking at a
>project for one of the major Backbone providers. They hired me to have
>a look at their intermediate Mail relays, they were interested in a
>solution which is open source, as a proof of concept. Now with their
>system we are looking at 26-40 Million messages a day! That is why I
>was going to look at precise averaging, but thinking about all of it
>for the latter of the day, I can only agree. My approach would not be
>measuring anything useful.
>
>Now what they are granting me as hardware is either a Sun Fire
>4500-8-Processor (with 8-12 Processors) and 8-16 Gig RAM. Or a solution
>based on multiple Intel Xeon Quad Processor Machines.

Personally I would go for the Xeon cluster, as it is more easily scalable
later on, as their mail load grows. Also, if half of it goes up in smoke
(or needs upgrading/maintaining) you still have a working service, albeit a
slightly slower one. I know you can dynamically reconfigure the bigger
SunFires, but a cluster does have its appeal...

Unfortunately no-one has bought me a quad Xeon machine to test MailScanner
on, so I can't give you accurate performance figures. But with dual 2.4GHz
Xeon machines, 40 million messages per day would keep 30 of them fairly
well occupied. You have to remember, of course, that my load tests are done
with a steady stream of mail, and not a peaky load that you would see in
real life.

As for Exim vs sendmail, I found Exim to lot easier to get to scale up to
multi-million figures. And configuring it to punt all mail at 1 other
machine is dead easy. I'm no Exim expert, not by a long way.

If you need any help whatsoever with this project, please don't hesitate to
get in touch. I will offer whatever help and advice I can.

>Computing Power really is no issue to them. I do not necessarily need a
>solution either where an open Source OS is being used, but the system
>itself which performs the scanning and delivers the framework has to be.
>
>Now I tested a bit with Ultra160 SCSI and the 2.5* kernel series.
>Agreeing with Julain usual I/O was lousy, but it is quite up to par now
>in the 2.5* series.
>
>According to their testing (I have no idea how through it has been)
>sendmail is the only MTA which can handle the load with their setup,
>thus I am on the safe side there as well. I was thinking about using
>sophos, but if there is a faster scanner, I am sure they would buy that
>one as well.
>
>- -d
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>  we may race and we may run, but we can not undo what has been done.
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--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support