A Performance Study of Conventional and Bare PC Webmail Servers

In this paper, we compare the performance of several Webmail servers and a bare PC Webmail server running without an operating system. The conventional Webmail servers used in the study are Icewarp, MailTraq and Hexamail running on Windows, and Atmail and Afterlogic running on Linux. Server performance is compared with respect to the typical email transactions (login, compose, and read), CPU utilization, and throughput. Performance under increased loads is measured by using a stress tool, and experiments are conducted in both LAN and WAN environments. The results indicate that bare PC Webmail server performance is consistent and predictable, whereas conventional Webmail server performance varies considerably depending on message size, server load and transaction.