Edge Transport server performance   

May not be a fair question but does anyone have a guess on how many messages 
per second, minute, hour or day that an Edge server can process?  Let's take 
an average server nowadays.  Two way, dual core 2.6 ghz, 8 GB of memory, two 
disk RAID 1 and a four disk RAID 10 for the database.  Antivirus such as 
forefront enabled.  SP1.  Just wondering how many messages per second might 
push the server to go into medium or high back pressure.

date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:53:00 -0800   author:   Joe N

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:53:00 -0800, Joe N
 wrote:

>May not be a fair question but does anyone have a guess on how many messages 
>per second, minute, hour or day that an Edge server can process?  Let's take 
>an average server nowadays.  Two way, dual core 2.6 ghz, 8 GB of memory, two 
>disk RAID 1 and a four disk RAID 10 for the database.  Antivirus such as 
>forefront enabled.  SP1.  Just wondering how many messages per second might 
>push the server to go into medium or high back pressure.

Yeah, that's not a fair question. How big is the bandwidth, how big
are the messages, how many recipients are on the messages going in or
out. Oh gosh, I could go on but you know the rest. Heck, that kind of
server is capable of shovelling staggering amounts of messages through
it. Mind you, a RAID10 for a little queue database? You must have
money to burn and four disks for RAID10? No, that's just daft.

date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:31:27 -0500   author:   Mark Arnold [MVP]

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

Well, I'm looking to replace our current appliances with four of those 
servers.  Two groups of two load balanced in seperate facilities.  We 
currently average about 3-6 million messages a day with a high spike to 9 
million.  Our outbound e-mail is only a few hundred thousand msgs a day.  
Legitimate e-mail is around 300k a day so we're about industry average of 
about 5-10% legit e-mail.

I don't know of any way to really test throughput.  My guess is the four 
servers would be enough based on researching MS documentation and a few 
customers who have deployed it.  What do you think?  Best guess?

Pre SP1 we were getting a number of back pressure warnings throughout the 
day on our Hub boxes with the RAID 10 group for the queue database.  IO 
seemed to be a coorelation.  Since applying SP1 we haven't had any events.

date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:10:01 -0800   author:   Joe N

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:10:01 -0800, Joe N
 wrote:

>Well, I'm looking to replace our current appliances with four of those 
>servers.  Two groups of two load balanced in seperate facilities.  We 
>currently average about 3-6 million messages a day with a high spike to 9 
>million.  Our outbound e-mail is only a few hundred thousand msgs a day.  
>Legitimate e-mail is around 300k a day so we're about industry average of 
>about 5-10% legit e-mail.
>
>I don't know of any way to really test throughput.  My guess is the four 
>servers would be enough based on researching MS documentation and a few 
>customers who have deployed it.  What do you think?  Best guess?
>
>Pre SP1 we were getting a number of back pressure warnings throughout the 
>day on our Hub boxes with the RAID 10 group for the queue database.  IO 
>seemed to be a coorelation.  Since applying SP1 we haven't had any events. 

Pre SP1 you'd get back pressure warnings if something as boring as
free space dropped below 4 gigs. It's now 500MB so I'd suspect the
reason your backpressure messages disappeared is explained fairly
simply.

Don't know what your appliances were doing before but Edge is able to
lookup whether an SMTP address is valid in AD or not and then drop the
connection. That alone will kill tens of thousands of messages a day
before they even get into the HT.

Does  your appliance drop the connection for bad smtp addresses?

date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:29:15 -0500   author:   Mark Arnold [MVP]

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

Yes the appliance did recipient verification which helped in the load.  
Feature wise it does pretty much everything that the Edge servers do except 
for end user white\black listing.

The back pressure definitely coorelated with high IO.  We're not completely 
sure what was causing it though.  Definitely not free space.  Could have been 
numebr of recipients or size of msg, who knows.

So you think four of these servers is good enough?

date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:11:01 -0800   author:   Joe N

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:11:01 -0800, Joe N
 wrote:

>Yes the appliance did recipient verification which helped in the load.  
>Feature wise it does pretty much everything that the Edge servers do except 
>for end user white\black listing.
>
>The back pressure definitely coorelated with high IO.  We're not completely 
>sure what was causing it though.  Definitely not free space.  Could have been 
>numebr of recipients or size of msg, who knows.
>
>So you think four of these servers is good enough?

The high I/o can easily be causality so you can't look at it and point
to one specific thing.
Those four servers look like overkill. I'd do two and add if required.
Remember, the servers can work a hell of a lot harder than your
Internet connection(s) and having a long queue on one Edge is no
different than a bunch of smaller queues on four of them.

date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:50:42 -0500   author:   Mark Arnold [MVP]

Re: Edge Transport server performance   

Thanks for the responses.  We're going to use four for site redundancy.  Two 
in the primary site and two in the secondary site.  We'll probably go live in 
a month or two.  I'll let you know how it goes.

date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:12:00 -0800   author:   Joe N