Ed,

Thanks! I expect to begin compiling my projected numbers later this week and I'll make sure to keep what you've said in mind.

Again, thanks...



>>Ed,
>>
>>Question..
>>
>>Do you have any 'sense' of where those outbound fax number would be at when WinFaxPro would start to bog down? I, too, am in a spot where I need a fairly quick solution. Since we don't really know where the numbers will end up I'd like to buy a little time and this seems a good way, as you suggested.
>>
>
>That depends on several things - memory and CPU speed are obviously an issue, where a faster processor will help with the rendering process outbound, and being able to keep stuff in RAM is a plus, and the type of modem being another - the cheap Windows modems which rely on the CPU rather than their own internal DSP hardware will bog down faster, since the CPU has to do more. The largest scale fax app I have running now is at one of my charter flight brokers, and using an eMachine with a 433MHz Celeron processor (slightly below what I see now as entry-level boxes at the office supply stores), 32MB of RAM, NetGear FA310 NIC, and a pair of older USR Sportster 33.6K external fax modems, it's able to render faxes with minimal graphics content as fast as it gets fed - they run a Word mail-merge from another station for their mailings, a light load of outbound correspondence via Word and Excel, and a charter routing app I wrote that generates SITAs and faxes, and Winfax just keeps pumping
>out faxes. The largest job I've actually seen them do was about 150 outbound faxes pumped out through Outlook and Word, and no problems were noted. The Win98 box is part of a small (8 node) NT domain; it shares its local drive for fax functions, and the box is happy as a clam day to day - they're constantly generating and faxing quotes at the brokers' stations, and the inbound fax repository is accessed across the network by stations as needed. 100BaseT LAN, NetGear NICs and switch, and the Win98 box also has a printer and scanner attached which get light use.
>
>I'd expect far worse performance if the fax server were actually generating the faxes, and the machine does slow down on the outbound service when a large document is inbound on one modem and the server is then doing OCR on the received document. I'd expect a faster box with more RAM, or a dual processor box under NT or 2K to improve the performance a lot; I'd want to use >128MB under Win2K. I use a PII 333 with 256MB under 2K Pro here at home for my WinGate Pro proxy/Firewall/PCAnywhere Gateway/WinFax Gateway and have no complaints, but I do very little faxing.
>
>>That would give me a little time to investigate the commercial offerings I'd think.
>
>And there's an easy upgrade path, too.