ned <ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com> writes:
What's the actual message/second number here?
I've done sustained rates as high as 60 messages a second with INN and no
particularly interesting hardware, and I'm pretty sure people are doing a
lot more than that.
Interesting. FYI, the performance of a reasonable MTA on ho-hum hardware these
days tends to be in the 30-60 message/second range, and rates of up to 200
message/second aren't unheard of.
I've seen rates in the 200-800 message/second range on better hardware.
Average daily traffic I believe is somewhat less than
that, probably something around 10-20 messages a second for a completely
full feed.
Any reasonable MTA could handle this rate.
Many of those messages are >1MB in size.
MTAs tend to be sized and tuned to handle smaller messages than this, so this
could be an issue.
One of the differences between mail and news is that with mail, once you
get traffic beyond a certain level, you just add more MX hosts, and you
distribute your users across multiple mail servers, so that no one machine
has to handle all your traffic. There really isn't any way to do that
with news effectively right now; one server pretty much has to process all
incoming news.
MX is indeed an advantage MTAs have. However, the ability to rack and stack
tends to disappear once you switch from talking about relay rates to delivery
rates. Building a store that can keep up with the rates a highly optimized MTA
can achieve is, well, challenging.
Ned