I'm writing a newsletter script. Well revising one I wrote a year ago. At that time I made it create multiple queue directories of no more than 2000 emails per queue and then run one copy of sendmail on each queue (largest queue first) until there were 85 copies of sendmail running.

Is that advantageous over simply dumping all the files straight into sendmail and letting it handle it?

I figure just dump it all to sendmail and tell sendmail to dump unsent messages in 24 hours rather than 5 days. Rather than trying to split it all up and then running multiple copies of sendmail on each queue directory.

Thanks for any advice. Managing the multiple queue directories is a pain and if there's really no need why bother!

Sounds like you're doing a lot of work trying to accomodate a mediocre MTA.

Using a single instance of Postfix (www.postfix.org) I am able to send out about 50,000 unique 1000-byte messages per hour. Hardware is a Pentium II 300MHz with 256MB RAM and a 7200rpm IDE drive. OS is RH Linux 7.1

Originally posted by Mike the newbie
Sounds like you're doing a lot of work trying to accomodate a mediocre MTA.

Using a single instance of Postfix (www.postfix.org) I am able to send out about 50,000 unique 1000-byte messages per hour. Hardware is a Pentium II 300MHz with 256MB RAM and a 7200rpm IDE drive. OS is RH Linux 7.1

The system I wrote would put out about 100K messages, about 33K per message (mime formatted, text and HTML bodies) on a Dual 550 with 512M and 7200RPM UWSCSI drives. Each email has a unique unsubscribe link which slows things down. As I can't open one connection to the mail server for say, AOL and say "these people" get "this message" as each message is different.

Using a Master and 2 Slaves it could churn out 240,000 emails an hour.

Originally posted by Dixiesys


The system I wrote would put out about 100K messages, about 33K per message (mime formatted, text and HTML bodies) on a Dual 550 with 512M and 7200RPM UWSCSI drives. Each email has a unique unsubscribe link which slows things down. As I can't open one connection to the mail server for say, AOL and say "these people" get "this message" as each message is different.

Using a Master and 2 Slaves it could churn out 240,000 emails an hour.


Yup, each message with a unique message body is what I was talking about when I mentioned the Postfix throughput rates. Sendmail is slow. I have found Postfix to be at least three to four times better in raw message throughput than sendmail, and about 15 to 20% better than qmail. With the box that you have, Postfix should be a screamer. Those UW SCSI drives are just what Postfix likes. :D (though 15krpm drives would be even nicer.) Just bump Postfix up to have 200 or 300 outbound delivery processes (a simple config file change from the default of 20 outbound processes), and you'll be golden. Iinstructions are on the postfix web site for this stuff, and the postfix users mailing list is excellent.

One thing you may want to investigate as well is to run a caching DNS locally. If you are relying on your ISP's DNS that will slow things down considerably. I went from 600mS per DNS lookup to 5mS per DNS lookup just by running a local DNS caching server (I used bind 9.2.0 in a caching configuration - it's simple to set up).

Originally posted by Mike the newbie



Yup, each message with a unique message body is what I was talking about when I mentioned the Postfix throughput rates. Sendmail is slow. I have found Postfix to be at least three to four times better in raw message throughput than sendmail, and about 15 to 20% better than qmail. With the box that you have, Postfix should be a screamer. Those UW SCSI drives are just what Postfix likes. :D (though 15krpm drives would be even nicer.) Just bump Postfix up to have 200 or 300 outbound delivery processes (a simple config file change from the default of 20 outbound processes), and you'll be golden. Iinstructions are on the postfix web site for this stuff, and the postfix users mailing list is excellent.

One thing you may want to investigate as well is to run a caching DNS locally. If you are relying on your ISP's DNS that will slow things down considerably. I went from 600mS per DNS lookup to 5mS per DNS lookup just by running a local DNS caching server (I used bind 9.2.0 in a caching configuration - it's simple to set up).

Oh yeah DNS caching is an absolute MUST. How many times do you need to lookup AOL's MX anyway? :)

Ok I might just try postfix I think it comes with RH2 nowadays anyway.

RedHat packages can be found here:
http://www.ea4els.ampr.org/~sjmudd/postfix/en/available-packages/


The postfix-users mailing list is very good.
http://www.postfix.org/lists.html


Enjoy!