[Mailman-Developers] Testing tools for MTAs.

[J C Lawrence]

While not directly on-topic for Mailman, this directly relates to
the prior discussion of large mailing lists, and Barry's current
efforts to set up test beds for large subscriber base lists.

  http://www.coker.com.au/postal/

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This is a program I am writing to benchmark SMTP servers. I started
work on this because I need to know which mail server will give the
best performance with more than 1,000,000 users. I have decided to
release it under the GPL because there is no benefit in keeping the
source secret, and the world needs to know which mail servers
perform well and which don't!

It works by taking a list of user names and applying random
transformations to them to get the FROM and TO addresses, this is
because if each email address takes 30 bytes of storage then
1,000,000 accounts would take 30M of RAM. 3,000,000 accounts would
take 90M of RAM which would be more than the memory in my test
machine (this would cause thrashing and make the benchmark invalid),
and it would take ages to load all that data from the hard
drive. Using 100,000 accounts and applying a transformation to map
them to 30M accounts is a much more efficient use of resources.

When sending the mail the subject and body will be random data. A
header field X-Postal will be used so that procmail can easily
filter out such email just in case you accidentally put your own
email address as one of the test addresses. ;)
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-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder@kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...