MailScanner load testing advice

headers Julian Field | 1 Apr 2004 11:29

At 10:11 01/04/2004, Pete wrote:
>Julian Field wrote:
>
>>At 02:42 01/04/2004, you wrote:
>>
>>>My colleague has written a small PHP script that will send a bunch of
>>>messages to my mailscanner machine. I was going to try and see how many
>>>i can send it before it starts complaining (eg 1000s, 10000s 1000000s
>>>etc) since my mailscanner machine and other test machine are both on the
>>>same lan.
>>>
>>>I have used the details from this test - but i wonder how stressful it
>>>is on MailScanner recieving the same email over and over ? as long as it
>>>triggers spam ruiles then its providing some stress?
>>>http://hyvatti.iki.fi/~jaakko/spam/unkillable.txt
>>
>>
>>Ideally you want to send different mail, a real life sample of your
>>mail traffic is best. I keep a little archive of 500,000 recent
>>messages for doing this. I have blatted all the sender and recipient
>>addresses to "anonymous" in the envelope data so that it can't leak
>>out. All the mail servers on my site have "anonymous" aliased to
>>"/dev/null" so every other mail server here will throw it away (my
>>test leaked out once and I learnt the hard way!).
>>
>>I then set up the MTA on the test server to send all the mail to a
>>separate named server which runs a little "smtpsinkd" script I wrote
>>which implements just enough SMTP to fool a mail server into thinking
>>it is talking to a real MTA. It throws away all data sent to it.
>>
>>So the tests involve 3 machines:
>>1) SMTP mail generator
>>2) test server you are interested in
>>3) SMTP sink
>>
>>If you want the smtpsinkd script, I have attached it to this message.
>Thanks so much for your input - I suppose i have a months worth of spam
>i could repeatedly send at the new server, as we store all spam for 30 days.
> From a copy of the quarantine directory, what would you do to send all
>the mail? does any one know if something like a perl script could scour
>the dirs and send it? re addressing it as it goes, so its all aimed at
>the one address as you describe? Or even just mailling it all again - i
>can make the mailscanner machine send all outbound mail to the machine
>running smtpsinkd ?
>
>Or is your 'SMTP' mail generator available for use by the public (me?)?

Sure. Help yourself. Didn't take long to write.

>I have the machines to do all this, but not the skills to write all the
>tools - maybe i could point 3 or more machines at my scanner all pumping
>it with spam - see if we can find a stress point - i would really like
>to know what the max this machine will handle - appreciate any further
>help i can get.
>
>thanks again Julian
>Pete

In which case take a look at the attached program. You will have to tweak
it a bit to suit your site but it takes raw sendmail queue files and
squirts them very fast at an SMTP server you name.

Re: MailScanner load testing advice