Postmark is not a mail server benchmark
I came across Peerapong Kunasirirat’s blog today and also read the same information via the official Sun’s PR blog ‘On the Record’.
Both blogs were discussing how ZFS is great for a mail server workload as benchmarked by Postmark. I have great respect for Sun’s performance team with alumni such as Adrian Cockroft [now with Netflix] and current superstars in their team such as Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall and I think ZFS is an innovative filesystem which eases a lot of pain
Thus it pains me a lot that they are trying to pass of a benchmark (Postmark) which does not have a single fsync(2) as appropiate for a mail server. A mail server has a number of crtical places where it has to do fsync in order to reliably write the message to queue. Failure to do so means that MTA has absolved responsbility.
To me a benchmark which models ISP mail workload correctly is Bruce Guenter’s benchmark . I think Sun should invest in porting this over to the filebench framework. This would command more respect than trying to pass of Postmark as representative of a ‘mail server’
Yusuf Goolamabbas 