[NBLUG/talk] Stress Testing servers

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Thu Nov 13 10:09:01 PST 2003


On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 09:55:24AM -0800, Steve wrote:
> 
> I just installed a new mail server for the company I work for.  It's not
> live yet =) But I want to stress test it big time for a couple days before
> it goes live.
> 
> Anyone know of a way to stress test a server?  In this case I want to test
> the mail server (Sendmail) and make sure the box wont fall over under load.
> 
> Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
> 
> -Steve
> 
> 
> -- 
> ----
>       "Knowing others is wisdom, knowing your self is Enlightenment."
>                                                    -- Lao-Tzu

Others probably have more experience with this, and hopefully will chime
in (with hopefully more professional methods).  

To my knowledge one of the main things that stresses a mailserver isn't as
much delivery as retrieval.  I would probably set up a three-machine
network, including the server.  

The first machine I would write a simple mail script to email an email to
each user every X period, with the period depending really upon how many
users you have, and how much traffic you expect.  The emails should
probably have some sort of number in the subject line so it's easy to track
and make sure that all the messages got there, and in what sequence. To
stress test it I'd probably try to give it about 3x the average traffic (or
if you know the typical max traffic, then 1.5 or double it) it will see.  

Then I would have a second machine set up to use pop or imap to check for
and retrieve new messages for every account every minute (you can do this
with a fetchmail script).  Whether fetchmail deletes the messages upon
retrieval is up to you.  You might want to test both.  A benefit of
deleting the messages is that you can run the test longer without having
to worry about filling up the hard drive.

I'd run this for a day or two (or shorter depending on how much space your
hard drive can take) if possible.

At the least, you will know your machine can handle maximum utilization.
Or you will be able to tweak and figure out at what point does the machine
become overloaded, so you can make sure that your usage never reaches that
point.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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