[Mailman-Users] Suggestions for Queuing bulk mailings?

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 01 Oct 2001 13:08:58 -0700 
arandall  <Amanda> wrote:

> I recently made a post to the effect of the speed of qmail - I
> have it running on a junk machine that nobody else wanted (see the
> respect Linux gets around here?! geez); it's an old HP Vectra
> workstation, p200 (233? I forget) with 64MB ram, and it queues up
> all thirty thousand messages in about five minutes. Of the ones
> for which we're able to get an immediate SMTP connect, they are
> all gone out in approximately fifteen minutes. The several hundred
> users with mailservers to which we can't get an immediate connect
> (from any mail server in the building, not just qmail) sometimes
> take hours to send, but the fault lies somewhere between point A
> and B (I suspect *at* point B in most instances) and not with
> qmail.

FWVLIW I have very similar statistics (which I reported here) under
Postfix.  My system is chunkier (Dual PII-333), is reasonably well
connected (3 T3'sm one to MAE West, two to other local
peers/transits).  IIRC delivery time for 1,000 RCPT TOs (200 spool
entries) down to the only-slow-MXes left is circa 3 minutes.  IIRC
while there were some issues surrounding Mailman's queue runner to
get 20K RCPT TOs (4,000 spool entries) off to the MTA in a unified
lump (given that I have no lists that large currently and so much
use several messages whose total receipt base sums to 20K) is
slightly less clean/rigorous testing suggested that Postfix would
drain the same queue down to slow MXes in about 7 minutes.

  ObNote: I haven't tested or looked at QMail in detail as I've
  little patience with DJB, less interest in the violence he
  delivers to the FHS, and just can't be bothered with his lack of
  licensing.

The early apparency here is that the main performance differences
between Exim and Postfix surround their handling of slow MXes and in
particular, Exim's maintenance of a persistent MX hints DB for
appropriate delivery strategies.  Thus, at least philosophically
Exim seems preferable for loadings with high(er) slow MX rates.  

> How do ya like them apples? :-)

They seem like very non-sendmail-like apples.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.