Hi There!
W B Hacker schrieb:
> Marc Perkel wrote:
>> I just got a call from someone wanting to be able to send 50k email
>> messages a second. Most of it in bursts of a few seconds long. It has to
>> do with some kind of gaming application. I'm just trying to picture in
>> my mind what kind of hardware could do that.
>
> They 'know not, and know not that they know not'.
Well... to push (or relay?) 50k Messages/sec through one machine
sounds difficult but doable to me... not counting smtp protocol/delay
issues. But it will needs some slightly optimized hardware. :-)
There is whole family of high performance embedded PowerPC
optimized for networking stuff which might help you to do this
job with an quite finite amount of money. Just one example:
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC8572E
The MPC8572E (4core and 8core will be called 8574 and 8578) is a
dual core PowerPC System-On-Chip for high performance networking
applications. It has a dedicated (RegEx) pattern matching unit, some
table lookup units and other off-load-engines for encryption and
security applications. Well... have a look at the product brief.
These CPUs are propably much cheaper to stack up than any other
high performance servers. But the development costs to program
the accelerators might be a bit higher if you start from scratch.
I was doing some hw/sw design around these machines and have a
native linux environment for this platform working quite well. :-)
If you are interested in details, let me know.
But to get back on topic: Does it basically make sense or is it
possible (from exim's codebase' point of view) to off-load some
exim drivers in the hardware accelerators?
Regards,
Clemens Koller
