Hello All,
Here is what I found in a cursory look for testing programs. Kevin Bucknum
[[EMAIL PROTECTED]] pointed me to a SMTP and Pop3 command line
clients. These tools in and of themselves don't give me any statistics
about the performance of the mail server but they do act as a mail client
that is practical for a controlled testing environment. From my initial
test, these programs seem to give up a little to easy when it cannot contact
the pop3 host but work at getting the mail.
*WARNING* As an aside, I ran these programs on a server and was able to
easily overwhelm the server, to the point that I had to 'killall tcprules'
to regain pop3 access.
Memtime is a program that tells me (accurately?) how much time it took to
pull the mail from the server. Once again, it does not talk about the
server load, just the amount of time it took to get the messages. What it
does give us is a base line for how long a user should be expected to wait
before they receive their email.
SMTPTest (Performs a mail delivery test)
PopTest (Performs a pop3 query and return true or false if successful.)
http://www.stalker.com/MailTests/
Memtime (Keeps track of how long a process took to return)
http://freshmeat.net/appindex/2000/05/25/959254966.html
Next, watching the load on the server to see what is happening in my
simulated pop3 mode. Below is a list of monitors. I have no experience
with any of them. It is my belief that we want a command line program that
logs usage of cpu load and memory either to standard out or a file.
The documentation of RunQ seems to be the most promising because the author
is concerned about how much cpu time the monitoring program use and it out
puts to a cvs file for graphing by your favorite grapher. (Un)fortunately,
the author still considers this program beta. Anybody have any comments
about these load monitors?
*Process Monitors*
ftp://ftp.atcomputing.nl/pub/tools/linux/
InfoWatcher
http://www.protech-eng-svcs.com/download/
procps
ftp://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/procps/procps-2.0.7.tar.gz
RunQ
http://web.wanadoo.be/rc.s/RunQ/
*Current test suite*
*Test*
Pop 3 connections
inbound Mail processing test
outbound mail relay-open based on ip address obtained through pop
authentication
*Configurations*
Qmail 1.03 with patches
Vpopmail with .cdb option
Vpopmail with mysql (db server local)
Vpopmail with mysql (db server distant)
Vpopmail with open ldap (db server local)
Vpopmail with open ldap (db server distant)
The following two are promising but will require some patches to vpopmail.
Ken et al??
Vpopmail with SQLRealy (Db server local)
Vpopmail with SQLRealy (Db server distant)
Matthew
