Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 05:14:29 +1200 From: Andrew McNaughton <andrew@squiz.co.nz> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: mail list delivery performance Message-ID: <199905031714.FAA07242@aniwa.sky>
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I've got custom software sending mail items to lists of a few hundred people. The list varies for each message. The time it takes to get this mail to our clients needs to be kept to a minimum. I'm seeing some messages take 15 minutes or more to get delivered to remote servers which themselves run fast and this is unacceptable. Some remote servers are slow or down, and this delays delivery to users whose servers are ready to accept mail quickly. Currently I'm splitting the list into groups of 30 addresses and starting a separate sendmail process for each. Probably I can reduce the number of addresses per list, but sometimes the messages come close together, and memory could become a problem. Moreover, while halving the length of the lists halves the mean delivery time, it doesn't change the fact that some users wind up waiting because other users have slow servers. I'd like to set very short timeouts for connection to servers on the initial attempt, so that the list gets moved through quickly regardless of slow servers. If the message delivery times out, I'd like it to go into the mail spool, and for queue runs to operate with a longer timeout. It looks like sendmail refuses to run as root if an alternate configuration file is specified, which presumably means it can't interact with the mail spool. I take it that means sendmail can't do what I described in the previous paragraph. Is there another approach with sendmail? Is there an alternative mail program which will handle this particular problem better? Andrew McNaughton -- ----------- Andrew McNaughton andrew@squiz.co.nz http://www.newsroom.co.nz/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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