Real Expectations..

[mikea]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 02:24:15PM -0400, Errol Neal wrote:
> Hi again..
>
> My boss is giving me headaches about the performance of our MailScanners.
> What kind of performance should one expect on Sun Solaris 500 mhz sparc
> with 512 ram and ide disks running 4.22-4?
> I think right now we are pumping out somewhere in the neighborhood of
> 300-500 messages per hour. I think that is reasonable for the hardware we
> have and these system are dedicated Scanners.
> Can someone throw some hardware templates at me based upon their
> experiences and give me some numbers?

I'm currently running a dedicated Intel P-III 450 MHz with IDE
disks, 384 MB RAM. OS is FreeBSD 4.8, with sendmail 8.12.something,
MailScanner, SpamAssassin using Bayesian filtering, and ClamAV. The
box does pretty well at this load, although it *will* be nice to get
the long-promised server-grade dual-P-IV-2.4-GHz box with 1 GB RAM and
huge Fast Wide SCSI-III disks:

                        Mail Statistics;
Produced by isdmon2:/home/mikea/bin/mailstats.pl; Run by isdmon2:/etc/crontab
         Mails   spamassassin   rejected      scanner       total mails
         Total   says 'spam'    by ruleset    says virus    undelivered
 Sep   3  6194  1543 (24.91%)  471 ( 7.60%)  651 (10.51%)  2665 (43.03%)
 Sep   2  6910  1400 (20.26%)  427 ( 6.18%)  703 (10.17%)  2530 (36.61%)
 Sep   1   129     4 ( 3.10%)    5 ( 3.88%)   45 (34.88%)    54 (41.86%)
 Aug  31    51     1 ( 1.96%)    2 ( 3.92%)    5 ( 9.80%)     8 (15.69%)
 Aug  30   585   255 (43.59%)   43 ( 7.35%)   89 (15.21%)   387 (66.15%)
 Aug  29  5381  1419 (26.37%)  407 ( 7.56%)  513 ( 9.53%)  2339 (43.47%)
 Aug  28  6131  1464 (23.88%)  454 ( 7.40%)  696 (11.35%)  2614 (42.64%)
 Aug  27  6638  1363 (20.53%)  495 ( 7.46%)  856 (12.90%)  2714 (40.89%)

My `top` output tends to look like this:

last pid: 51725;  load averages:  0.50,  0.62,  0.52
              up 30+05:40:08  13:41:16
147 processes: 147 sleeping
CPU states: 41.2% user,  0.0% nice, 12.0% system,  0.4% interrupt, 46.5% idle
Mem: 124M Active, 125M Inact, 77M Wired, 13M Cache, 48M Buf, 34M Free
Swap: 2048M Total, 55M Used, 1993M Free, 2% Inuse

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
38768 mikea      2   0 13420K 10812K select  63:34  4.54%  4.54% Xvnc
39894 root      10   0 27432K 25996K nanslp   0:19  2.00%  2.00% perl
40821 root      10   0 27324K 25876K nanslp   0:14  0.44%  0.44% perl
39825 root      10   0 27500K 26072K nanslp   0:17  0.29%  0.29% perl


--
Mike Andrews
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin since 1964