If spam is a problem for your IT organization, one possible solution that Alan Yoshida and Ramin Moazeni (both of Sun) recommend is using Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam (SBAS) on servers powered with UltraAPARC T1 and T2 processors. Given the ability of the UltraSPARC processors to handle highly threaded network throughput-oriented applications and the fact that SBAS is just such a solution, the combination almost recommends itself in the view of the authors. Their complete paper can be found here.

The authors provide background information on SBAS software and UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processor-powered servers, the configurations used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti-spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels. Originally published in October 2006, when the hardware was a Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server, the article has been updated to reflect more recent measurements comparing a Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 server to a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server using virtually the same tuning parameters.

The paper notes that SBAS integrates with the leading mail transfer agents, examines every incoming email, and provides a spam classification that can be used to direct the disposition of each message. The solution gains much of its power from the near real-time filtering rule updates based on the latest spam techniques for which Symantec is continuously developing countermeasures.

As noted earlier, the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors thrive on multiple threads, with a single 8-core processor able to handle 32 and 64 threads, respectively. Most commercial software needs some tuning to best utilize a processor with zero internal thread-switching overhead, and SBAS is no exception, the authors observe. After tuning both the SBAS operating parameters and the Solaris OS shared library environment, Sun was able to increase performance from an out-of-the-box 18 messages per second to 94 messages per second, a 5.2x improvement. Comparing the tuned Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 performance to out-of-the-box Sun Fire V240 (dual processor) performance, an 8.2x increase was achieved.

Most of the performance improvement is directly related to increasing the thread count in SBAS and reducing the contention for locks that arises from having a large number of active threads. Comparing UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processor-powered servers, the writers measured an additional speedup of 2.33x when comparing two fully-tuned servers. Even more astonishing, they write, is the fact that this level of performance was obtained while the server was drawing a mere 287 watts of power. [...read more...]

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