Answer
The GMS was designed from the outset to be a reliable, scalable and highly performance product. Time is spent at each stage of its development, not only ensuring reliability, but also ensuring that all actions can be carried out as securely and quickly as possible.
Performance is extremely important as users expect instant responses when sending or receiving mail. Delivery time for local messages, i.e. on the same server, is typically instant. Outside of the server a typical delivery time is 0.5 seconds, assuming that a high capacity network is available for delivery, and that the receiving server is able to perform equally well and is available at the time of sending.
This means that users don’t have to wait long periods for mail delivery, important when collaborating on a document with a colleague.
In a typical mail transaction a messaging server has to do a lot of work. It will likely have to check for viruses, both encrypt and decrypt the message on the fly, compress and uncompress pages, and so on. An impressive performance is therefore necessary.
GMS is very small in size – the 15Mb installation includes 10 languages, all on-line help, Web, SSL, Calendaring, Instant Messaging, Enhanced SMTP, etc. This indicates just how tightly written and efficient the GMS code is. As part of the design of the software it was necessary to re-write some operating system routines to speed them up. The tight design also helps to ensure there are no bottlenecks in the system, when GMS accepts a message it has already been written to the users mailbox. Other servers accept messages and queue them internally, resulting bottlenecks and failures with messages being lost a direct result.
Tests run by independent consultants have shown the GMS handling up to four times the email throughput of a comparable sendmail server.
Customers have reported handling millions of email messages through a single GMS server in a 24 hour period.
In addition, with its in built load sharing facilities, GMS is infinitely scalable, there is no limit to the size of the installation you can have.
Keywords:high performance messaging server