> With 16 logical CPUs, in this configuration you'll find your CPU load > to be 1/16th of the theoretical maximum + overhead. Your report of 10% > is about right.
The system has 16 physical execution units: four quad core AMD Opterons. In the configuration I described, 90% of total cycles are unused. > What exactly are you trying to measure with this "benchmark"? I'm measuring how many emails Postfix can deliver per-sec to some number of virtual aliases. I'm not interested so much in the absolute throughput performance, but in the reasons for the performance. > No realistic configuration has the same critical resource, and you'll > run out of disk I/O throughput or CPU first depending on how CPU hungry > your content-filters are. I understand this. > If you really are planning to host all spools in RAM disk, and need more > than 3000 msgs/sec, I am most curious what use-case motivates this design > and performance requirement. I don't have a real use-case in mind. For curiosities sake I would like to know what the second-order bottlenecks are after the disk and network. I suspect that I mis-configured because postfix only utilizes 10% of available cycles. I realize this is a synthetic/contrived/silly "benchmark" and a little outside the scope of what is normally discussed on this list..but I would still like to know why postfix uses 10% of available cycles. Silas
