[Mailman-Developers] Some notes on my stuff...

Bill Bradford mrbill@mrbill.net
Mon, 23 Jul 2001 10:41:09 -0500


On Sun, Jul 22, 2001 at 10:15:15PM -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> For those that don't remember, my big mailman machine (Sun E250, mailman
> 2.0.5, sendmail) was maxing out at about 625 messages processed a day -- and
> we were seeing peak backlogs of 4 hours between receiving and processing.
> Not good.
> My testing showed the major processing delay was the speed of uptake by
> sendmail, primarily due to DNS delays. And given that you can't turn off DNS
> lookups without turning off a lot of the anti-spam stuff, you're kinda
> stuck.

I went from sendmail to postfix, and saw at least a 10x speed improvement
(from 12-hours-max from sending an email to a list to receiving it, to
 12 *minutes*.)  Turns out Sendmail was choking on the "backlog" queue of
 deferred/undeliverable email.  Postfix basically says "okay, I"ll try
 this later, and i'll deliver the email now that CAN be delivered".

I'm MUCH happier with Postfix.  I've got 3-4 1000-user lists and one
3000-user list, with 10-15 mails to each list every day.  I do about 500meg/day
of outgoing mail volume.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill@mrbill.net
Austin, TX