Painful performance on mupdate push (how long does yours take?)

[Michael Bacon]

We're in the last stages of getting off of our old single-server mail  
system into a murder environment, and we're currently at the point  
where the single old backend gets starts pushing its mb database to  
the mupdate server, so that we can move the main DNS pointer to the  
front-ends and start moving mailboxes over to other servers.

Last Friday night, I tried that push for the first time, thinking it  
would take 10-20 minutes, tops (for an 850k line mailbox database, or  
about 75 MB).  3.5 hours later, it finally completed, and a subsequent  
ctl_mboxlist -m hung indefinitely, with neither side doing anything  
(as per truss).

Since this was originally a push to a non-global Solaris zone  
connecting to a ZFS file system over the "local loopback" interface  
that Sun has for its zones, I tried to see if the problem went away by  
connecting to a vanilla Solaris install on UFS.  Nope, still syncing  
on the order of 30-40k per minute.  I tried shutting off the GSSAPI  
security layer (max SASL layer set to 0), same performance issue.   
Since all of this was on Sun CoolThreads hardware, I spent the last  
part of this afternoon trying to run it on an old school sparc box,  
but didn't get it running before I left for the day.

Surely this isn't the kind of performance I should expect, right?  For  
large sites, how long does an initial mboxlist push to the MUPDATE  
server usually take, and for how many lines?  And is anyone else  
running a murder on Sun CoolThreads (Tx000, T5x20) server hardware?

Thanks much,
Michael Bacon
ITS Messaging
UNC Chapel Hill