Mailessentials Lacklustre Performance
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Mailessentials Lacklustre Performance - 27.Sep.2009 2:08:03 PM
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itsupport@zagat.com
Posts: 25
Joined: 1.Aug.2007
Status: offline
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I'm curious to know what GFI is doing to address the performance issues that seem to get worse as multicore servers are being utilized as SMTP relays. MailEssentials is inherently a single-threaded application and anyone who has watched gfiscans.exe on task manager can observe.
This approach makes no sense as performance does not scale when adding new multicore servers. I have an 8-core SMTP relay running GFI MailEssentials/MailSecurity and quite frankly I'm seriously disappointed when I see no more than 20% cpu (system) utilization and only one core at a time maxing out at 100% (or 12.5% system). Especially when I have e-mail backing up in the mailroot\queue during peak hours.
Why isn't instancing available as a feature? Why can't there be more advanced smtp message queueing where the SMTPsink can route email to more than once instance of ME & MS, based on availability? Unfortunately, due to this poor performance & design it is forcing me to look at other perimeter scanning solutions that can utilize the resources on a server more efficiently.
Now, if there is some hidden feature somewhere that was tucked away into some GFI manual that I haven't yet found and read, I would love to know and be proven utterly wrong on this. :)
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RE: Mailessentials Lacklustre Performance - 28.Sep.2009 5:12:39 AM
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Nicks
Posts: 2741
Joined: 17.Mar.2003
Status: offline
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Hi,
Recently, we have made various changes in MailEssentials which do improve performance, however none of these take advantage of multi-core servers. The improvements include processing message at SMTP level by Directory Harvesting, thus limiting the amount of emails which get fully processed by MailEssentials, processing of all the DNS Blacklists at one go, and other minor improvements to individual modules.
Unfortunately, there are no hidden settings that can be enabled to make MailEssentials multi-core aware. We are however looking into taking advantage of multiple cores, but it is still too early to provide any time estimates. We will update this thread with any updates related to this.
On the other hand, MailSecurity is already multi-core aware, and will take advantage of multiple cores when necessary.
_____________________________
Nicholas Sciberras
GFI Software - www.gfi.com
Messaging, Content Security & Network Security Software
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RE: Mailessentials Lacklustre Performance - 29.Sep.2009 9:42:55 AM
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itsupport@zagat.com
Posts: 25
Joined: 1.Aug.2007
Status: offline
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Nicks,
I appreciate the response. As an IT professional for the last several years, it would be advantageous for GFI's customers to be made aware of this for design & implementation.
Zagat has been using GFI for over 5 years now (before I started with the company), and after spending the last few years watching the evolution of MailEssentials I've observed it really has a distinct personality. The product made much more sense years ago when most servers were single or dual proc but still single core.
My real gripe is the waste in resources. That gets back to my first statement for design & implementation. Had I known this when we updated relays two years ago, I wouldn't have bought 4-core & 8-core servers as SMTP relays. That wasted hundreds of dollars per server. Even with the multicore approach in MailSecurity, it too has points where it is inherently single-threaded and tasks are bound to one core/one instance (GFIScanM.exe).
My criticism is so GFI can better compete in the marketplace. I'm not trying to slander anyone; but I think the line of communication needs to be more clear to the IT professional and ME needs to be far more efficient at utilizing resources (especially in terms of paralellization). Your competitors have solutions that are easier to implement and manage both physically and virtually and are very efficient at what they do. I'd like to see GFI do them better than the competition.
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RE: Mailessentials Lacklustre Performance - 30.Sep.2009 4:15:36 AM
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Nicks
Posts: 2741
Joined: 17.Mar.2003
Status: offline
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Hi,
Thanks once again for the constructive criticism. We have taken note of your comments, and will refer to them when we are planning to implement the changes discussed previously.
_____________________________
Nicholas Sciberras
GFI Software - www.gfi.com
Messaging, Content Security & Network Security Software
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