Re: NTMail Performance

Jeff Woods ( jeff@delta.com )
Thu, 05 Feb 1998 13:50:20 -0500

We found that by establishing a trusted connection from NTMail to SQL at
boot time, by using Explorer to map a network drive, and telling it to
reconnect at reboot. The NT box statrs with an AutoAdminLogin with a
username and password identical to that of an authorized user of SQL and
the Emerald system. Thus, the CONNECTION is already established, and NO
authentication needs to take place for a RADIUS request from that machine
-- the machine is "trusted". This greatly reduces overhead and increases
performance greatly.

At 12:12 PM 2/5/98 -0500, you wrote:

>We had the same problem, we found that replicating the emerald database on a
>separate server just for NTMail to use helped 150%.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Duane Schaub <dschaub@terraworld.net>
>To: emerald@emerald.iea.com <emerald@emerald.iea.com>
>Date: Thursday, February 05, 1998 12:11 PM
>Subject: NTMail Performance
>
>
>>I am getting poor performance from my NTmail/Emerald setup.
>>
>>NTMail is running on a machine with 128Mb ram/P200(Just a plain old 200)
>>and IIS4 with a few domains. After running for a day or so, POP and SMTP
>>occupy about 70-90 MB of RAM by themselves, and inetinfo user another 40Mb.
>> It takes about 24 hours to reach these ram levels. Immediately after boot
>>up, only about 71 Mb (including disk cache) is in use. I believe that the
>>inetinfo size is due to IIS caching its web content.
>>
>>Anyway, SQL is on a different server p166/96Mb RAM. When a user checks POP
>>mail, it takes 10-15 seconds for emer_ntm to retrieve the user info from
>>the DB. It almost seems like it has to login to the SQL server or
>>something like that. The SQL server only has about 10-15% CPU utilization
>>and considerable idletime on the Harddrive. It appears to just be sitting
>>there after the pop request has come in.
>>
>>Is this performance normal with NTmail? I have a number of users
>>complaining that SOME of their incoming mail is bouncing back to the sender
>>with invalid user errors. This is only some mail. Also, when checking pop
>>mail sometimes users get "Invalid username/password". They can check again
>>a few seconds later and it works. The problem is that some users
>>immediately start playing with their system and screw it up. Then I spent
>>the next half hour trying to fix them.
>>
>>Here's one for Dale.... Can you make an SQL script that will generate a
>>file (like radius) that can bet run with the command line ntmail program to
>>save the users to the ntmail registry. This will allow users to bypass the
>>ntmail.dll and full utlilize the aliases, etc within emerald. If this can
>>be done in an external program or as an SQL script, then I can schedule it
>>to run periodically during the day. This will reduce the loading on the
>>SQL server and reduce network traffic plus significantly enhance the
>>reliability of the NTmail server since it won't rely on the ODBC
>>connection... Which seems shaky at best.
>>
>>Duane.
>>
>>
>>
>>==========================================================================
>>Duane Schaub, President |Terra World, Inc - Connecting The Planet
>>Terra World, Inc. |Southeast Kansas' Leading Provider
>>200 Arco Place, Suite 252 |Flat Fee - Never an hourly Charge
>>Independence, Kansas 67301 |Where Service is Top Priority!
>>Voice (316) 332-1616 |http://www.terraworld.net
>>FAX: (316) 332-1451 |dschaub@terraworld.net
>>===========================================================================
>>
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