Re: Expected performance of importing mail?

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

----- "Freddie Cash" <fjwcash@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, but look at the hardware difference between your setup and mine.
> Yours should be several orders of magnitude faster.  :)  If I can do
> a
> 250 MB mailbox in an hour using IDE disks on a RAID5 via a 100 Mbps
> connection, you should be able to do a lot more than that.  

But that would only apply if, in fact, either your disks or your network connection were the bottleneck.

Since you said your CPU was pegged at 100%, it would appear that in your case, CPU was the bottleneck, and even RAID5 SATA drives were sufficient to handle that particular load. In my case, nothing appears to be saturated - cpu, disk, and network are all moderately loaded. That suggests a performance limitation somewhere else - perhaps a particular part of the chain of receiving a message that saturates the CPU, but not for long enough to show as 100% cpu usage.

Since MacOS 10.5 now supports dtrace, we're going to try installing 5.0.5 there, replicate the problem, and use dtrace to see if we can home in on where the bottleneck is. I'll report back if we find anything..



-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University
Sent from Zimbra