[Mailman-Developers] [PATCH] MTA patch for sendmail/qmail

[Balazs Nagy]

On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Nigel Metheringham wrote:

> I find this *very* strange - I would expect the process startup hit to 
> be a real performance limiter in this situation.  However some of the 
> differences in the way that qmail runs as opposed to a sendmail or 
> similar MTA daemon may well mean that this method works for qmail.

Well, qmail just put the mail to the queue.  If you use SMTP directly, you
have to deal with connection failures, error codes etc (== you have to use
an own queue other than the MTA).  *This* is the deal.

> Certainly the latency to connect to a loopback network socket should be 
> minimal (as long as no one starts trying to do strange things like 
> remote DNS reverse lookups of 127.0.0.1).

Sure - this can be true for sendmail giant, but the slimmer commands doesn't
allocate loads of memory, doesn't parse big files.  If you use SMTP port,
firstly you open that connection, an inetd/tcpserver calls a qmail-smtpd,
which calls a qmail-inject, besides of the local delivery, which only calls
qmail-inject.

> Other downsides are the inability to deal with errors relating to a 
> single recipient other than by a bounce message (ie no per recipient 
> turnround message).

Yeah.  But your method doesn't work for a lot of addresses too.  IMHO that
solution doesn't work effectively.
-- 
Regards: Kevin (Balazs)