BarricadeMX experiences

[Stephen Swaney]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
> bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Res
> Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 6:05 PM
> To: MailScanner discussion
> Subject: RE: BarricadeMX experiences
> 
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> On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Stephen Swaney wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for listening and feel free to direct queries or flames direct
> to me
> 
> See my comment in previous, have you done two separate tests and what
> are
> the results?
> 
> I'd also hope it can do more than 1K concurrent, It's 8am here, a very
> quiet
> time and currently
> mx-in-2:~# ps ax | grep -c sendmail
> 604
> 
> This figure can easily triple at times.
> 

We've seen over +2000 simultaneous connections on a dual CPU system with 2GB
of RAM. The applications seems to be limited only by the number of file
descriptors allocated to the process (which can be changed in the web
interface). I just saw a case where the load on one system with +1300
simultaneous connection was less than 0.2. This system was a single CPU /
Dual core with 2 GB Of RAM.

In fact we have yet to hit a limit. When we have hit the max number of
connections allowed by the file descriptors, the application has not failed
- just refused new connections. We have then raised the number of file
descriptors available and all was again well. 

It should be mentioned that each connection requires only 2KB of memory and
2 file descriptors. Did I say this was pretty tightly coded :)

Note that you cannot "replay" spam to test the system since the blocking
depend on the quality of spammer's connection. The only way we can test is
on live systems / spam traps. No system that we have yet installed has ever
hit the capacity of BarricadeMX. 

As a result we don't know we don't how much mail any given system
configuration can handle. We can only say that a system with w CPUS of x
type / speed, and y RAM is handling a certain number of messages per day
with an average load of z.

Best regards,

Steve
steve at fsl.com
www.fsl.com

> 
> --
> Cheers
> Res
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