1

I'm using Russell Coker's postal software to stress-test our mail server.

But I can't squeeze more than 24576 messages per minute out of it!

This seems to be a limitation on postal's side as I can fire up another instance on another machine (or the same machine) and easily squeeze through another 24576.

[root@client test]# postal -m 32 -M 4 -t 256 -c 128 -r 0 10.0.0.232 user-list
time,messages,data(K),errors,connections,SSL connections
14:21,13736,254013,0,416,0
14:22,25176,465690,0,358,0
14:23,24576,454808,0,352,0
14:24,24576,451941,0,375,0
14:25,24576,453869,0,376,0
14:26,24576,455206,0,385,0
14:27,24576,452850,0,356,0

Any idea if there's something else I'm missing or if there's something else I can change? After source-diving, I observed the throttling code doesn't even run when the rate-limit is the default (0), so it's not that.

MikeyB
  • 39,291
  • 10
  • 105
  • 189

2 Answers2

1

I ended up writing a python script that would spawn a number of postal processes and aggregate the results.

Sometimes it's not worth solving the actual problem, but putting in a sensible solution that works around it.

If anyone happens to need to solve this particular problem in the future, get in touch with me and I may be able to pass the code on to you.

MikeyB
  • 39,291
  • 10
  • 105
  • 189
0

Did you try to give the user running postal more than 1024 file handles?

Janne Pikkarainen
  • 31,852
  • 4
  • 58
  • 81