An insight of email traffic in universities
Okay, here is a cool question about neat things like ye olde email farm
in your uni.
If u guys work at a university, it would be fun to know how many email
boxes you have and how much email traffic do you get. This variables
would be helpfull:
a) Number of email I/O (bulk total, how many in, how many out)
b) How many users u have
Its a neat thing to know when youre starting to set one up yourself. For
example, Uwash does 120k users 800k emails a day.
I want to make a spreadsheet model to calculate the ammount of bandwidth
and IOPS demanded by a maildir smtp farm depending on how many users
there are, how many emails do they receive in a particular ammount of
time, assuming that they are click crazy and check their email exactly
at the time it arrives...etc. It will take into account that you have an
IMAP farm for checking the emails and will also attempt to calculate the
bw generated by click crazy monkeys.
Ive just started making it but im worried that i will assume stupid
things, so i wanna gather some more real data to see if its all fitting
in. For example, i assume that all users have a workstation and are
checking their email at the very same period where most of the email is
arriving (thats what i call a worst case scenario).
I know this will not make for a trustable model because of the
complexity of usage prediction (can one really predict the next outlook
worm?....mhm... yes, come to think of it, it has a probability that
approaches 1 as time passes...:-).... that kind of thing. But i think it
can provide some with insight modeling this kind of things. The fun part
will be when i build a test farm just to see how crazy am i (or not?).
So if anyone can/will spare some time to share this data and/or is
interested in this kind of modeling (or know of a way that is -The Right
Way- (TM)) take pity and post it to the list!
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