Thanks Katherine!

Does anyone know of a good stress test tool for an email server such as Mercury, that can do load testing of SMTP, IMAP and POP3?

Somewhere I have a program that can open connections (up to a maximum) on any port you choose. Any use?

Simulating actual traffic is a bit harder.

No - sorry, wanted to "bombard" a server from multiple clients, utilizing simultane access to protocols, mainly smtp and pop3 - to see how Mercury and competitors behave under extreme load.

There's a SMTP stress test tool which was actually written for Xmailserver but works well with any SMTP. Unfortunately the guy who wrote it seems to be not active anymore and his page is offline so I have put it on my server: http://hideout.ath.cx/xstress01.zip It's ~108kb, source is included as well. Hope it helps.

Edit: For POP3 you could probably use the cmd line tool 'Popget' from http://www.ltsw.se/ftp/lantech.htp along with some script/batch.

Best regards,

Nico

Thank you for that - looks like a start.

[quote user="tBB"]..so I have put it on my server: http://hideout.ath.cx/xstress01.zip It's ~108kb[/quote]

Should come with a warning - sets off all sorts of a/v warnings even in .zip form.  This sort of software often does IME.

don't understand what IME is, but the sources were clean - and the doc seems ok for a rough test.

Interesting questions are: what to test? throughput? connection pooling and re-use, simultane use - crash on heavy load? yuk ...

Any thoughts?

Back in the old days I developed a test of netware throughput, which outperformed NT4 by miles, and there we tweaked packet sizes, fragmented etc to see how coax 10 base 2 behaved compared to token ring, and later twisted pair cabling. What was interesting back then was that the 286 machinery didn't have a chance at communicating compared to newer machines with newer NICs. So good collision detection is also quite important.

[quote user="PaulW"]

Should come with a warning - sets off all sorts of a/v warnings even in .zip form.  This sort of software often does IME.

[/quote]

Don't know what scanner you're using but that's what virustotal says about Xstress.exe:

File Xstress.exe received on 11.06.2008 10:07:52 (CET)
Current status: finished 
Result: 1/36 (2.78%) 

Antivirus Version Last Update Result
AhnLab-V3 2008.11.5.3 2008.11.06 -
AntiVir 7.9.0.26 2008.11.06 -
Authentium 5.1.0.4 2008.11.06 -
Avast 4.8.1248.0 2008.11.05 -
AVG 8.0.0.161 2008.11.05 -
BitDefender 7.2 2008.11.06 -
CAT-QuickHeal 9.50 2008.11.04 -
ClamAV 0.94.1 2008.11.06 -
DrWeb 4.44.0.09170 2008.11.06 -
eSafe 7.0.17.0 2008.11.05 -
eTrust-Vet 31.6.6194 2008.11.06 -
Ewido 4.0 2008.11.05 -
F-Prot 4.4.4.56 2008.11.06 -
F-Secure 8.0.14332.0 2008.11.06 -
Fortinet 3.117.0.0 2008.11.05 -
GData 19 2008.11.06 -
Ikarus T3.1.1.45.0 2008.11.06 -
K7AntiVirus 7.10.517 2008.11.05 -
Kaspersky 7.0.0.125 2008.11.06 -
McAfee 5425 2008.11.05 -
Microsoft 1.4005 2008.11.06 -
NOD32 3589 2008.11.06 -
Norman 5.80.02 2008.11.05 -
Panda 9.0.0.4 2008.11.05 Suspicious file
PCTools 4.4.2.0 2008.11.05 -
Prevx1 V2 2008.11.06 -
Rising 21.02.30.00 2008.11.06 -
SecureWeb-Gateway 6.7.6 2008.11.06 -
Sophos 4.35.0 2008.11.06 -
Sunbelt 3.1.1783.2 2008.11.05 -
Symantec 10 2008.11.06 -
TheHacker 6.3.1.1.141 2008.11.05 -
TrendMicro 8.700.0.1004 2008.11.06 -
VBA32 3.12.8.9 2008.11.05 -
ViRobot 2008.11.6.1454 2008.11.06 -
VirusBuster 4.5.11.0 2008.11.05 -

Best regards,

Nico

[quote user="tBB"]Don't know what scanner you're using but that's what virustotal says about Xstress.exe:[/quote]

F-prot, and it's not xstress which triggered the warnings, it's the many different eicar samples (some of which were identified as another variant).

yeah i too had the same query, but could you tell me how xstress works, i wana to have any sujjestion, it works only on smtp protocol... Essentially it creates multiple connections to mail server and sends multiple mails repeatedly over all connections. l..

you can try out these latest tools to see how it goes when you simulate large traffics:

softwareqatest - several tools for you to use

mxtoolbox -  test will connect to a mail server via SMTP, perform a simple Open Relay Test and verify the server has a reverse DNS (PTR) record. 

MultiMail-2-0-Freeware-SMTP-stress-testing-tool - free program can be used to stress test SMTP servers. It also aids anti-Spam tool developers as a useful mail-bombardment tool.

hope this helps  :)

thank you for this katherine, really appreciated it. I'm checking out my site and want to know what will happen with regards to the traffic data and how my spam software can handle it. Nothing better than being equipped than be caught off guard.