CommuniGate Pro is speed king

In this evaluation, we quickly found that modern hardware — even within the VMware and SAN environment — offers very good performance for these messaging servers. Our performance tests stress the mail servers far beyond what any midsize business would see for incoming mail load, and even some large-sized ones. However, we did find that when on-board antispam and antivirus are in use, performance drops considerably and may affect how users perceive system response time.

To test performance, we sent in 4,000 messages to each server, at an offered load of 20 messages per second. Then, we looked to see how long it took each system to receive and file the messages and make them available to end users for reading.
It's clear that the speed king of this test is CommuniGate Pro, which was able to handle 20 messages per second, even when antivirus and antispam were in use. Partially, this success is because of an intelligent choice of antispam product. CommuniGate Pro shipped to us with Cloudmark antispam, an early antispam competitor in heavy use in service provider environments where performance is an important consideration. For comparison, the two slowest products in our test, Zimbra Collaboration Suite and MDaemon, both use SpamAssassin, a product infamous for its poor performance.

Click to see: Chart showing Exchange alternatives performance

Several products, including MailSite and Zimbra Collaboration Server, failed to accept 20 messages per second, even without antispam and antivirus in place. If you choose either of these products, make sure you tune carefully for performance and select higher-end hardware to have a greater margin. Both of these products should probably be deployed with external antispam/antivirus gateways to ensure users don't see a slow-down during mail bursts.

Because Scalix didn't send us an antispam/antivirus product, and also because of the daunting task of trying to integrate a third-party product, we did not test with antispam and antivirus enabled.

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