[Mailman-Users] Mailman performance / sends per hour

[Jon Carnes]

On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 12:19, Vivek Khera wrote:
> >>>>> "JS" == John Smith <john_smith_45678 at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> JS> With a dedicated Pentium 4 2GHz / 1 GB RAM server /
> JS> 10Mbs, what sort of performance should be possible
> JS> with Mailman? Sends per hour / max subscribers.
> 
> I think it depends on your MTA and whether you have personalization on
> in Mailman (which will increase the number of messages being pumped
> through).  Also, sending mail tends to be disk-bound if you are not
> network-bound.
> 
Right! Given decent equipment the MTA is the primary worry.  For best
performance you really want to use an optimized MTA like Postfix. 
Postfix shuffles slow responding mail sites to the end of the queue so
that they don't hold up the outflow of mail.  The increase in efficiency
this gives you is tremendous and far outweighs any other gains.

The next best thing you can do is use a nice fast LVD disk subsystem
(maybe even a RAID) for your /var volume. MTA's follow a specification
that ensures the delivery of mail, even if the server goes down.  This
means that each and every transaction is written somewhere on disk.  So
moving mail around takes a very large number of read and writes! We say
that mail servers are disk I/O bound.

So, you really didn't give us enough information to guess at how well
your server will do. Still you can probably count on at least 2k
messages/minute if you have a SCSI disk subsystem and use something like
Postfix.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes

BTW: if you choose to use Sendmail, I have some tweaks that let it run
in an quasi-optimized mode (similar to Postfix).  You will find them
described here:
  http://www.trilug.org/~jonc/mailserver/PartIII.html