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From: cricket@hpcc01.HP.COM (Cricket Liu)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: mail gateways
Message-ID: <1240002@hpcc01.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 91 19:00:42 GMT
References: <1991Jan22.053940.24424@pa.dec.com>
Organization: the Mosthamster's Desk, Internet Engineering
Lines: 46

Brian,

I run HP's primary mail gateway, relay.hp.com.  I'd be happy to compare
notes with you.

    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?

That sounds like a lot.  I'm just starting to get good numbers after our
syslog-muncher broke, but after a quick look at the last hundred or so logs
(ugh), I'd say we average about 4000 messages per day, with a peak of about
10000.  I'm afraid I don't have figures for the number of recipients.

    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.

Sounds like you're doing well.  How are your delivery times?

    Another example: transport mix.

We're not too interesting here.  relay is TCP/IP only.

    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.

relay is an HP9000/845 (about 24 MIPS) with 48 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?

Well, if I take 10,000 messages per day to be relay's peak, then our max
message-handling capacity is ~6.5 messages per day per MIP-megabyte.
Sounds like we're right in the ballpark.

I've also got numbers of delay, if that's interesting to you.  We might
also compare local topology (relay is close to our 10 Mbps microwave link
to BARRNet) and flavor of mailer.

Now I wonder if IBM will give us their stats...

cricket

hostmaster@hp.com