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!
