Re: Experience on HylaFAX with 50 modems

[Steve Williams <steve@genie96.com>]

> 
> Hi,
> 
>    My department is now using HylaFAX v4.0pl0 with IBM RS/6000
> and 6 Rockwell based FAX modem under AIX 3.2.5. The server is
> mainly used for dispatching FAX (a daily average of 500 pages).
> We are also receiving a few pages of FAX everyday.
> 
>    The package is running fine without problems.
> 
>    My department is now planning to expand our FAX server package.
> The planned server will be used to dispatch about 5000 pages of
> FAX to over 200 destinations daily. About 50 FAX lines will be
> used in the package.
> 
>    I am now writing to see if there is anybody having the experience
> of using HylaFAX similar to our planned scale. If yes, what would be
> their hardware and software platform ?
> 
>    Also can anybody give comments on the comparision of HylaFAX and
> some commercial FAX server packages ? As HylaFAX is designed to be
> used with different FAX modems, I found there is overhead in
> dispatching FAX (HylaFAX used over 1 minute to initialise the FAX
> modem before every dialing).

If this is the case, maybe you want to post some logs to this list.  The
actual initialization of the fax modem goes very fast on my system.  
The SLOW part is actually rendering the image using ghostscript.
( 1991 vintage RS6000 )

If it is indeed the initialization that is slow in your situation, let's 
see a log of one of your transmissions.

There are several ways to help reduce the RENDERING time.  They may not
be applicable if you are sending different information to each site, but
it is something to keep in mind.

One way is to specify multiple destinations on the sendfax command line.
The advantage of this is economy of disk space as well.  The one document
will be used for all jobs.  Warning though, someone posted recently that
there might be a "feature" <bug> with this code that breaks it.

If you can possibly get "standard" pages, and render them to tiff, then
you can send the "tiff" files, rather than postscript/ascii.  This way, 
there is NO rendering done at all.  To render them to tiff, take a look 
at the ps2fax script for the command to use.

Good Luck, very interesting to hear the scale that you are talking about.
-- 
	Steve Williams, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
	Genie Computer Systems Inc.
	steve@genie96.com