Re: Experience on HylaFAX with 50 modems

[Andrew Smith <asmith@valleyt.co.uk>]

We have two years experience of sending orders to suppliers directly from
a purchase order system.  The programs which we wrote draw all the forms
and when faxed are difficult to tell apart from faxed paper copies.

Volume is approx 70,000 sheets per annum.

This is sent out through two to six multitech MT2834ZDX modems on a
Stallion Easy I/O system on fine quality with each sheet taking approx
45-60 seconds.

Fifty fax modems sending seems far too many unless it is critical that
faxes are delivered as quickly as possible.  You have to remember that the
major problem you will experience is "busy" recipient machines.  They are
a real hassle.  People seem to think that a computer fax modem will always
get through immediately to the recipient.  The logs on Hylafax are really
useful when anyone questions why the recipient supposedly didn't get their
fax.  If the receiving machine has a memory and the power goes off, the
faxes are lost.  Some inkjet machines continue to print "white" when they
run out of ink.

As you can tell we send faxes in the "real" world.  Email me if you wish
further info.

On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Steve Williams wrote:

> > 
> > 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
> 
> 

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Andrew Smith BSc(Hons), MBA                            Tel: 0131-551 2702
Valley Technology Limited, Edinburgh. SCOTLAND         Fax: 0131-551 2702
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