CalMail Growing Pains

The new campus email system, CalMail, has been experiencing growing pains
during its first month of full production.

Many of you have experienced slow performance at various times,
particularly during peak usage periods. In addition, last Monday some
users had email attachments corrupted which were caused by performance
related issues. While we have resolved the corruption problems, the
performance issues remain.

We've been working hard to tune the system to resolve these problems. The
CommuniGatePro software is used by large enterprises and service providers
such as eBay and Megapath DSL to handle millions of messages per day. We
implemented a clustered network mirroring these larger installations in
accordance with the vendor's recommendation, and load-tested the system
prior to roll-out. Unfortunately, it was impossible to completely
simulate the actual email usage profiles of our 48,000 users.

CalMail technical staff and vendors have been working nights and weekends
to isolate the root causes of the poor performance. Our working
hypothesis is that the problems result from data not being read quickly
enough from the high speed disk storage to the back-end servers. We have
an action plan to solve this issue.

We believe that once these problems are resolved, CalMail will meet its
goals of providing reliable, high performance email service to the campus.
We'll keep you up to date regarding our progress, and apologize for the
inconvenience these problems have caused you and the users you support.

-CalMail Consulting

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Received on Mon Feb 9 15:00:28 2004