[nycbug-talk] Mail stress test

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 25, 2005, at 1:20 PM, Pete Wright wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 12:36:36PM -0500, Steve Rieger wrote:
>> Does anybody on the list know of a decent script I can run to stress 
>> test my
>> smtp, pp, and imap servers,
>>
>
> hey steve,
> 	sorry i don't know any off the top of my head, altho
> i do know that there are ample perl modules that offer this
> functionality (smtp, pop and imap).  the problem may be tho
>  that you will end up stressing the client running the script
>  before you end up stressing the server.

The number of TCP connections that it'll accept is likely to be much, 
much, much, much higher than the number of active connections it can 
deal with.  Unless the application is written particularly poorly, 
you'll hit kernel limitations (but maybe just a soft one, like the 
per-process descriptor limit) before the application will notice.

Ideally you really need a benchmark that actually attempts to do 
something with the server, like all of the http benchmarks do.  Though, 
i can't say I know of anything for other protocols.

-bob