sendmail throughput

[Martha Mueller]

How can I judge the amount of sendmail traffic my system will support? We are experiencing no problems, but will want to expand. How can I tell the number of mail messages currently being sent per hour? Is there some method other than sorting the //var//adm//syslog//mail.log?

Our system is an L2000 with 2 cpu's and 2 GB memory.

[someone_4 · Accepted solution]

hey there..
How about the
mailstats command.
Just type mailstats at the command line and it starts. You can also do a man on mailstats.

Richard

[Martha Mueller]

Thank you. That was just what I needed.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Martha:

First check your /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file. There should be an entry
0 StatusFile=/etc/mail/sendmail.st (or whatever you like).
If you made changes to this file, stop and restart sendmail. You must also create this file; e.g. cp /dev/null /etc/mail/sendmail.st.

You can then use the mailstats command to output the statistics. Man mailstats for details.

Regards, Clay

[Martha Mueller]

Thank you, too. I was just trying to figure out what the man page was telling me when answered. Thanks for saving my brain cells some work.

[Craig Rants]

Martha,
By default I think that sendmail will handle 100 concurrent connections without refusing connections, and will allow the system load to reach 12 before it stops accepting connections. Given that background, rarely have I seen any box get that backed up unless someone was DOSing the sendmail service. We have a small A180 handling all our external email connections, and we are a large company, so I would venture to say that your L is more than sufficient.

GL,
C