Re: [hylafax-users] Newbie meeting a challange: 20K outbound faxes in 5 hours # With HylaFAX? what RAS hardware?

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stefan Röschinger wrote:

> Please welcome me to your mailing list ... we need help ... badly :)
>
> We opened a new playground with the challange to build a fax server that
> is capable to send out at least 25.000 faxes per day during daytime
> (500k and more per month)


If you refer to "daytime" as lasting 5 hours long, then that comes to 83 
faxes per minute.  Roughly speaking you're going to need that many 
modems/channels, since you can roughly estimate that a page of fax takes 
a minute (everyone else, I don't care to debate this estimate, as it 
varies completely based on the TIFF size and the negotiation speed and 
the params used... I just use 1 min per fax as a "rough" estimate).

So you're looking at 3 E1's.  So you'll need Eicon Diva Server, Patton 
2977, or BrookTrout cards.  The latter will not work with open-source 
HylaFAX.

The Diva Server will cost you less in CPU overhead and RAM than the 
2977, but as CPU and RAM are cheap these days, that cost probably isn't 
much of a factor except that you need to be aware of the need to have a 
beefier system with the 2977 than with the Diva Server.

That said, I think that your bottleneck is more likely to be the 
outbound queues (disk) and queue processing.  So if you can mount a RAM 
disk and use that for the HylaFAX spool directory, you'll be well-off.  
Of course, you may need a fair amount of RAM to do that.

As long, then, as you stagger your fax submissions into the queue at a 
rate that doesn't overwhelm faxq but that doesn't leave the modems idle, 
then you're okay.  Properly preparing your image for transmission 
*before* submitting it would also help.

I don't know how many fax machines in Europe support JBIG compression, 
but if even 10% of them do, then you may want to spearhead HylaFAX JBIG 
support, since that will usually prove to be a significant savings in 
image transfer time.

Lee.


____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
 To subscribe/unsubscribe, click http://lists.hylafax.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
On UNIX: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@xxxxxxxxxxx < /dev/null
 *To learn about commercial HylaFAX(tm) support, mail sales@xxxxxxxxx*