From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Sep 23 16:56:41 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8BB2C16A41F; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:56:41 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from schultz@sgi.com) Received: from omx1.americas.sgi.com (omx1-ext.sgi.com [192.48.179.11]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1A0E443D53; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:56:38 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from schultz@sgi.com) Received: from flecktone.americas.sgi.com (flecktone.americas.sgi.com [198.149.16.15]) by omx1.americas.sgi.com (8.12.10/8.12.9/linux-outbound_gateway-1.1) with ESMTP id j8NGubxT005243; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:56:37 -0500 Received: from tantric.americas.sgi.com (tantric.americas.sgi.com [137.38.227.200]) by flecktone.americas.sgi.com (8.12.9/8.12.10/SGI_generic_relay-1.2) with ESMTP id j8NGubDN16245826; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:56:37 -0500 (CDT) Received: from tdream.americas.sgi.com (tdream.americas.sgi.com [137.38.89.89]) by tantric.americas.sgi.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 76B1293042; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:56:37 -0500 (CDT) Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:56:37 -0500 (CDT) From: Randy Schultz X-X-Sender: schultz@tdream.americas.sgi.com To: Deepak Naidu In-Reply-To: <20050920174443.78027.qmail@web34614.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: References: <20050920174443.78027.qmail@web34614.mail.mud.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Performance of mailserevr in FreeBSD 5.4 X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:56:41 -0000 On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Deepak Naidu spaketh thusly: -}Thanx Randy, -} -} It would be good, if I have some data of posted doc regarding this... or of -}your own experience. Thanx for your advise .... Ok. I'm posting this to advocacy as well in case any find it useful or at least interesting. Here's a summation of the testing I did and the results of those tests. As we were only looking for a few things this is far from a scientific analysis so FWIW. Test background/setup: I wanted to test various configs to see what gave the best throughput in a relay configuration for our real-time requirements, i.e. ave # of recipients, ave size of each email, etc. - OS's: FreeBSD 5.4 with and w/o softupdates, Fedora Core 3, Fedora Core 4. The FC installations used ext3 for the filesystems. I wanted to try with Reiser but ran out of time. - Sink systems simply threw everything to /dev/null. We had multiple sink systems to ensure they were never a chokepoint. - Source systems used fbsd's postal package as: postal -m 11 -p 4 -c 2 d3 usernames - where usernames contained 2 and 3 usernames. No significant difference was found using 2 or 3 usernames. - Test relay was a dual-proc 800 MHz system PC with 1 GB RAM and the entire system on 1 5400 RPM drive. (I know - nobody would ever run a mail server with /var/spool on the root drive but we were really just looking for difference percentages, not max throughput and had some old systems lying around... ;) - All installs were default installs. I thought about tweaking this or that, e.g. postfix has some notes on things to do for high-volume installations that we didn't do. I wanted out-of-the-box as much as possible. Tweaking can quickly turn into a slippery slope of just 1 more here and 1 more there. I figured we can tweak all we want for more specific needs as they arise. - The versions of sendmail and postfix were whatever was current stable in June, compiled locally with default build instructions. So, given all that, here's the #'s I came up with. Sendmail Linux: 47,000 emails/hr FreeBSD: 66,000 emails/hr this is about a 40% increase in throughput. Postfix Linux: 86,000 emails/hr FreeBSD: 223,000 emails/hr this is about a 260% increase in throughput. The above data is for FC4 and FBSD 5.4 with softupdates enabled. My apologies but I can't find the notes for FC3 and FBSD w/o softupdates. FC4 was faster but not by much, and by about the same % for sendmail and postfix. Softupdates showed a similar pattern(as expected) - not as fast as with softupdates. IIRC the data for postfix/fbsd w/o softupdates was still around 190k emails/hr(this is from memory so take it with a grain of salt). I was amazed at the difference with postfix. Whatever Mr. Venema did inside postfix really works well on fbsd. Even though I can't find the #'s I remember my amazement that fbsd w/o softupdates still smoked FC4 when using postfix. Pls remember this is far from a scientific analysis. Your mileage will vary in many ways. I would recommend doing your own tests with your own criteria. -- Randy (schultz@sgi.com) 715-726-2832 email bodhisattva <*> "There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed."