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Subject: Re: Large job submissions
From: Jonathan Bartlett (johnnybwolfram.com)
Date: Tue Jul 04 2000 - 03:06:15 CDT

Postfix is a very well-behaved mailer. I don't think that there is any
way to bring a machine to a halt using Postfix like you can with sendmail.
We have a 200Mhz Linux box (64 MB RAM) that handles a 40,000 member email
list within a few hours, with the load never going over 2. Also, these
mails are dynamically generated, so each is a separate message, while you
are probably just sending one message with 20,000 recipients.

Jon

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Francisco Reyes wrote:

> At work I may be given the chance to try PostFix.
> We have a process which creates about 20,000 emails at once.
> Based on what I have been told so far the current machine
> couldn't handle it and they had to change the submitting program
> to send smaller batches.
>
> I haven't got a clear picture yet of the requirements, but it
> seems that delivery time is not the biggest problem, but the
> machine accepting all these emails. The current machine could
> not handle the job submition. I am sure that machine is probably
> not configured properly, but it is much easier for me to try
> postfix than to try to figure out what they did to that box
> (running Solaris/sendmail and I am most familiar with FreeBSD
> and now learning Postfix).
>
> What kind of changes can I make to accept such big jobs?
> They are giving me a test box at first with only 64MB of ram and
> probably an 8Gig drive, so there is not much room for
> configuration there. Will 50 SMTP agents be ok with 64MBs? I
> expect message sizes to be between 5K and 20K.
>
> If this works out, then I will get another computer and I would
> like suggestions on terms of some basic specs. For instance what
> directories would benefit from having their own disk?
> So far I was thinking of /var/spool/postfix and
> /var/spool/mqueue
> Which directory will hold all the incoming messages "mqueue?"
> Will 256MB be OK?
>
> Again the overriding concern does not seem to be that the
> messages go out super fast, but that the machine can accept all
> the messages. It really doesn't make much difference if the
> machine takes 30 minutes or two hours. Obviously I want to
> create the best setup I can with whatever hardware they give me
> so I would play with the settings before going on production.
>
> Francisco
>
>