On Thu, 2010-05-20 at 14:20 -0400, Dave Lugo wrote:
> I've been asked regarding how much mail exim
> can handle per day.
Ugh. Thorny question.
> Are there any benchmarks out there that I can
> look at?
I'm not sure, but...
> Yes, I know I can run my own (and I have); I'd
> just like a few more data points if they're
> available.
...the problem (for you, in terms of data) is that there is no
"standard" configuration of Exim on a given "standard" piece of
hardware.
Exim scales pretty well and (like most MTAs) is usually limited by the
hardware it runs on. Unfortunately it seems only the big boys bother to
shell out time and money for SPEC tests (see
http://www.spec.org/mail2001/results/ ,
http://www.spec.org/mail2009/results/mail2009.html ) and they throw some
serious hardware at it.
I think a more pertinent set of questions would be:
1. How many messages/day do you *want* to handle?
2. On what sort of, and how many servers?
3. What storage do you have available?
4. Do you need to relay (authenticated senders, for example)?
5. What format do you store lookup tables in?
6. How many users do you have?
...
N. The Nth question. Probably "are you running inline AS/AV?", or
something... and so on, and so forth.
Unfortunately, as you can see, the answer to your original question is
"it depends". I'm sure there are people on the list who can offer you
some raw data from their systems, but given the infinitesimal likelihood
of their systems being anything like yours, that data might as well be
cheese :)
FWIW at work we now deliver something like 60 messages/min when averaged
over a year; we've dumped enormous queues after planned backend outages
at rates well in excess of 10 times that without the servers getting
overloaded. [caveat: Google now handle our student mail so our average
load has gone down].
Sorry that's not a more definitive answer!
Graeme
