Workload analysis of SPECmail2009

SPECmail2009 is a new benchmark suite for measuring the performance of corporate mail servers. It assumes the IMAP4 protocol for retrieving messages and a large fraction of transactions are for manipulating hierarchical messages and mail folders from the users connected via high-speed networks. In this paper, we present a performance analysis of SPECmail2009, including disk I/O behavior, quality of service metrics, and CPU time breakdown. The IMAP4´s capability of directly manipulating the messages on the server makes SPECmail2009 a highly I/O-bound workload. Our experiments show that a combination of a small but fast access SCSI drive for indexing messages and larger but slower SATA drives for message files can be an option for building a cost-effective mail storage. Both of multiprocessing and multithreading are quite effective for SPECmail2009 especially in the user mode execution.