I was playing around with qmailanalog and decided to share some of my
results. I'm not sure if I'll get any deeply meaningful discussion about
them, but I thought I'd give it a try :-) I'm not sure if I am analysing
some of the numbers correctly so I'd be very interested in any help there.
These are some of the results for yesterday, an average day with no major
mailing list traffic, and for the day before, where 3 or 4 messages were
sent to my 40K user mailing list (but otherwise an average day).
no mailing list mailing list
Messages 10139 12422
Delivery Attempts 19117 155438
Average xdelay 13.5604 22.5135 seconds
Average ddelay 56.6633 6405 seconds
Average concurrency 3.00251 40.4903
10% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 0.22 100.29
average 0.21 20.28
50% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 0.47 6391.85
average 0.27 2099.18
90% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 113.27 11943.10
average 7.55 4170.89
One can sort of see that a large mailing list puts quite a different load
on the system than individual traffic. The delivery times without the
mailing list running are excellent.
On the mailing list, the average delivery time is getting very skewed
because it takes so long to run through the list. In addition, during
this time no other deliveries are taking place. Since qmail handles the
mail on a first-come-first-served basis, if the mailing list sends 3
messages in a row, and it takes, say, 2 hours to run through each message,
no other deliveries are going to be made for 6 hours! IMHO, some sort of
mechanism to allow other queued messages to be delivered promptly should
be a top priority.
The time to deliver the list, however, looks pretty good. It's about
43000 users, and from the qmailanalog results it looks like it's
delivering it mostly in well under 2 hours (there's just the few dead
sites etc. that push up the results.) The list, BTW, is being maintained
by qlist with outgoing mail going through Majordomo's resend to handle
moderation. Majordomo itself was much too heavy to run for
subscribe/unsubscribes for this particular list, though I still use it for
my other lists. I'm really itching to try out ezmlm.
This machine is a Pentium-90 with 128 MB RAM (32 MB of which is BUFMEM),
concurrencyremote 255, with a single Barracuda 2LP fast/wide disk and
BSD/OS 3.0. I'm on a T1. Nothing terribly fancy. Can you imagine how
this same configuration used to run with sendmail? :-)
Evan
results. I'm not sure if I'll get any deeply meaningful discussion about
them, but I thought I'd give it a try :-) I'm not sure if I am analysing
some of the numbers correctly so I'd be very interested in any help there.
These are some of the results for yesterday, an average day with no major
mailing list traffic, and for the day before, where 3 or 4 messages were
sent to my 40K user mailing list (but otherwise an average day).
no mailing list mailing list
Messages 10139 12422
Delivery Attempts 19117 155438
Average xdelay 13.5604 22.5135 seconds
Average ddelay 56.6633 6405 seconds
Average concurrency 3.00251 40.4903
10% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 0.22 100.29
average 0.21 20.28
50% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 0.47 6391.85
average 0.27 2099.18
90% messages doneby (seconds)
absolute 113.27 11943.10
average 7.55 4170.89
One can sort of see that a large mailing list puts quite a different load
on the system than individual traffic. The delivery times without the
mailing list running are excellent.
On the mailing list, the average delivery time is getting very skewed
because it takes so long to run through the list. In addition, during
this time no other deliveries are taking place. Since qmail handles the
mail on a first-come-first-served basis, if the mailing list sends 3
messages in a row, and it takes, say, 2 hours to run through each message,
no other deliveries are going to be made for 6 hours! IMHO, some sort of
mechanism to allow other queued messages to be delivered promptly should
be a top priority.
The time to deliver the list, however, looks pretty good. It's about
43000 users, and from the qmailanalog results it looks like it's
delivering it mostly in well under 2 hours (there's just the few dead
sites etc. that push up the results.) The list, BTW, is being maintained
by qlist with outgoing mail going through Majordomo's resend to handle
moderation. Majordomo itself was much too heavy to run for
subscribe/unsubscribes for this particular list, though I still use it for
my other lists. I'm really itching to try out ezmlm.
This machine is a Pentium-90 with 128 MB RAM (32 MB of which is BUFMEM),
concurrencyremote 255, with a single Barracuda 2LP fast/wide disk and
BSD/OS 3.0. I'm on a T1. Nothing terribly fancy. Can you imagine how
this same configuration used to run with sendmail? :-)
Evan