[Mimedefang] Some info about amounts/day/load

[Fredrik Hansen]

I thought it may be useful with some stress-test info, here is my test 
environmet setup and results!

Software:
RedHat9.0 2.4.20-24.9smp
MIMEDefang 2.39
F-Prot 4.1.2
Sendmail 8.12.9/8.12.8

Hardware:
Motherboard MSI9015, mainly 133FSB is interesting to know
Dual 866 P3
768 Mb DDR Ram, 510Mb Swap
Pretty regular 7200RPM/133 IDE drives
10mbit FD connection.

I tested with the following setup:
Mimedefang flags:
MX_MINIMUM=10
MX_MAXIMUM=15
MX_IDLE=10
MX_QUEUE_SIZE=90
MX_QUEUE_TIMEOUT=300

The following shellscript were used from an external host to deliver loads 
of mail:

for (( i = 1; i <= 600; i++ ))
do
mail spamtest at myhost.mydomain -s "spam test" < spam.txt
mail spamtest at myhost.mydomain -s "virus test" < eicar.com
mail spamtest at myhost.mydomain -s "normalt test" < normal.txt
sleep 1
done


This shellscript will send 3 mails/sec during a time of one hour to the 
testserver, ie 3*60*60*24=259200 mails per day.

My conclusion is that the HD's are constantly moving files at 3-4 MB/s,
the internet bandwith used was < 100Kb/s, the total CPU load had an 
average of ~50%, and the box got ~7 degrees warmer per cpu(eh, yeah 
actually) during testing.

So, next up is putting bins and mailspool in a ramdisk to get rid of the 
HD bottleneck :-)

Of course this information is highly depending on what exactly the 
mimedefang-filter consists of, but I havent done too much 'optimizations' 
of it, redirecting spam to another mailbox is the one i can come up with.
But maybe someone could have some use of it as a pointer to what that can 
be achieved with a pretty cheap HW setup.

Drop me a mail if I missed some important info.

Merry Christmas and Best Regards,
Fredrik