Your MailScanner stats

James Gray james at grayonline.id.au
Wed Jan 21 03:30:05 GMT 2004


On Wed, 21 Jan 2004 01:02 pm, Vicchiullo, Rob wrote:
> Just wondering if people wouldn't mind sharing some stats of there box
> and how MailScanner runs.
>
> Like CPU, Memory, OS, Major MailScanner config options and how many
> emails you can handle in an hour.

Here's the vitals for our corporate gateway:

HP Proliant DL360-G2
P3-1.4GHz
1Gb ECC 133MHz RAM
2x36Gb U160 10k RPM SCSI drive (Hardware RAID 0+1)
2 x 10/100/1000 NIC's, both running full duplex 100Mbps
FreeBSD 4.8_RELEASE
Sendmail 8.10.12
MailScanner 4.25-14 (5 child processes)
SpamAssassin 2.61 (+1200 custom rules)
Perl 5.8 (CPAN and all modules are the CPAN versions)
NAI/McAfee VirusScan 4.3.20

Daily mail average is close to 16,000 messages and 120MB data.
That is about 670msg/hr (11msg/min) and about 7.5kB/msg.
Average server load is 0.11 (11%) with spikes to 0.62 (62%).

Average swap usage is 0%.  In other words, the whole process runs entirely
in RAM.  In fact, I can't ever remember seeing ANY swap in use....even when
we did a "make world" recently - swap is definitely turned on though.

We've estimated the network connection will be limiting with our setup
before the server ever runs out of resources, and we've got 200Mbps to the
internet!

However if we turned off all the RBL/network tests in both SpamAssassin and
MailScanner, we estimate our theoretical hourly capacity at about 7000
messages (168,000msg/day) or 10 times what we currently do (a group of us
just crunched the numbers).  This number is purely theoretical based on the
memory bandwidth, as everything happens in RAM, and doesn't take into
account any paging etc.  More realistically we could safely cope with
5500-6000msg/hr.

James
--
Fortune cookies says:
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
                -- Mark Twain



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