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From: reid@wrl.dec.com (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: mail gateways
Message-ID: <1991Jan22.053940.24424@pa.dec.com>
Date: 22 Jan 91 05:39:40 GMT
Sender: news@pa.dec.com (News)
Organization: DEC Western Research
Lines: 26


I'm interested in learning some vital statistics of mail gateways. Paul
Vixie and I run Digital Equipment Corporation's primary mail gateway,
decwrl.dec.com, and I've been wondering how it compares with others.

For example: our typical load on a business day is 10,000 messages which get
delivered to 17,000 recipients. Is that a lot or a little? I know that uunet
is bigger, but how much bigger? On a crisis day, our gateway seems to be able
to max out at maybe 22,000 messages delivered to 35,000 recipients. Surely
other gateways have crisis days; are we doing well or poorly.

Another example: transport mix. A rough glance at our log files shows me that
about 40% of our traffic is DECNET (which isn't all that strange because we
are DEC), and 40% of our traffic is TCP/IP, and the rest is uucp. Do other
gateways move a significant amount of mail to or from DECNET? 

What hardware do you use? We use a pair of DECsystem 5400 computers, which
are about 25 MIPS each, and which have 64 MBytes of memory. That says that
our crisis peak message-handling capacity is 22,000 messages per 3200
MIP-megabytes, using speed cross VM occupancy is a crude measure of capacity.
That's about 7 messages per day per MIP megabyte. Is that a lot or a 
little?

Anybody else have any data?

Brian Reid