[Exim] stress testing exim

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Author: Ronny Vaningh
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] stress testing exim
Hi

I want to persuade my boss to migrate our mailsystems to exim.

I tried to stress test my mailserver running 4.12.

The hardware is a dual P3 XEON700 with 1 GB of RAM
RAID1 message spool and separate RAID1 system/log partition on 10Krpm
scsi disks.

This hardware should normally be able to cope with some load.

The current setup is pretty straightforward:

standard rcpt acl
smtp_accept_max set to 200
split queue

However when I start putting more than approx 70 simultaneous smtp
sessions against the box the load starts killing my machine ranging up
to loads of 200 and 100% CPU usage.

It seems that it`s not capable of handling all the deliveries.

I tried running queue only with a few queue runners.

Mail took longer to get out but load levels were acceptable.

Do you have any sugestions how to set up a box so that it would be able
to process around 120K messages per hour (15Kb-30Kb).

We are not doing anything special like filtering, callouts, no rbl
(yet), just basic relay host and domain control.

Thanks in advance


Ronny