Re: qmail postfix
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 08:45:23PM +0100, Markus Stumpf wrote: On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 12:26:55PM -0600, Mate Wierdl wrote: On the ezmlm list somebody asked if he needed the bigtodo patch if he is to set up 15 lists with 50K subscribers each, and the lists get exactly one message/day. I would have thought, no since my P120 box handles 180K messages a day with no noticable problem. But Russ said 15x50K is hard on a normal qmail queue. Aehm ... if you use ezmlm you get 15 messages (i.e. files) not 15x50K messages. So the big-todo patch ist of no relevance here. Well, I am thinking about bad or sluggish addresses; a bounce comes back, and deposited in the queue. Then there are the messages ezmlm-warn sends out... I doubt they are single messages with lots of recipients... With no experience here, I believe what you are saying, that this activity is pretty negligible. Mate
Re: qmail postfix
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 10:43:28AM -0600, Mate Wierdl wrote: Well, I am thinking about bad or sluggish addresses; a bounce comes back, and deposited in the queue. Then there are the messages ezmlm-warn sends out... I doubt they are single messages with lots of recipients... With no experience here, I believe what you are saying, that this activity is pretty negligible. The big gain in using ezmlm here is that you have a pretty much "clean" userbase. Users that don't have valid email addresses cannot subscribe because they don't get the confirmation request back. So the only dropouts are addresses that got deleted which in turn will be automagically unsubscribed by ezmlm. I had posted the URL of a picture that shows the delivery of the 95000+ newletter in the past, here it is again: http://www.lamer.de/maex/creative/software/qmail/deliver-stats2.gif The delivery starts at about timestamp 300 and the first pass is finished at around 2950 (scale is seconds). The next two peaks are retries. a high percentage of the subscriber base is at yahoo addresses :(( The problem ist that the mail servers are very unresponsive and at certain times quite a lot of delivery slots are filled up with hanging delivery attempts which degrades the performance :(( But as this is a dedicated server for that newsletter at the moment there is no need for optimising at the moment (could be done e.g. with a second qmail on that same machine that gets all the yahoo mails, so they're out of the way for list delivery). \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet.
Re: qmail postfix
On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 09:06:37AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote: Mate Wierdl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apparently with large mailinglists the bigtodo patch is needed. big-concurrency, perhaps. big-todo is usually only necessary on systems that handle *lots* of messages. On the ezmlm list somebody asked if he needed the bigtodo patch if he is to set up 15 lists with 50K subscribers each, and the lists get exactly one message/day. I would have thought, no since my P120 box handles 180K messages a day with no noticable problem. But Russ said 15x50K is hard on a normal qmail queue. Are you trying select the most popular MTA or the best MTA for the job? I am not trying to select; just asking for info. In user friendliness (extension addresses [hence ezmlm support], syntaxless small config files), nothing beats qmail, so postfix is not a candidate for me. But it seemed that some people out there expressed concerns about qmail's scalability, and, not being in the loop, I wanted to know if their concerns are justified. Mate
Re: qmail postfix
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 12:26:55PM -0600, Mate Wierdl wrote: On the ezmlm list somebody asked if he needed the bigtodo patch if he is to set up 15 lists with 50K subscribers each, and the lists get exactly one message/day. I would have thought, no since my P120 box handles 180K messages a day with no noticable problem. But Russ said 15x50K is hard on a normal qmail queue. Aehm ... if you use ezmlm you get 15 messages (i.e. files) not 15x50K messages. So the big-todo patch ist of no relevance here. However I would recommend using the big-concurrency patch and set concurrencyremote to 500 or more. I have a Pentium III (551.25-MHz 686-class CPU) 256 MB RAM on a RAID 5 dedicated machine for a 95000 users newsletter list. concurrencyremote set to 250. It delivers the 95000 messages in about 1 hour. \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet.
Re: qmail postfix
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 12:26:55PM -0600, Mate Wierdl wrote: On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 09:06:37AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote: Mate Wierdl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apparently with large mailinglists the bigtodo patch is needed. big-concurrency, perhaps. big-todo is usually only necessary on systems that handle *lots* of messages. On the ezmlm list somebody asked if he needed the bigtodo patch if he is to set up 15 lists with 50K subscribers each, and the lists get exactly one message/day. I would have thought, no since my P120 box handles 180K messages a day with no noticable problem. But Russ said 15x50K is hard on a normal qmail queue. You are confused. One message to an ezmlm list, no matter how many subscribers, is one message in the queue. big-todo has nothing to do with this. big-concurrency can help, tho :) Greetz, Peter.
Re: qmail postfix
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 08:45:23PM +0100, Markus Stumpf wrote: [snip] I have a Pentium III (551.25-MHz 686-class CPU) 256 MB RAM on a RAID 5 dedicated machine for a 95000 users newsletter list. concurrencyremote set to 250. It delivers the 95000 messages in about 1 hour. I have a dual PIII (850 I think) with 1GB of RAM and a single 9GB SCSI disk for queue. It delivers a lunchtime newsletter to 10.000 recipients in 3 minutes 6 seconds (the list is about 11.000 subscribers, but some of 'm have slow smtp servers). About 80 of the recipients are local, the rest is out on the wide internet. concurrencyremote is 256, btw. We're only doing this list since yesterday so I never needed any remote concurrency. queue performance is very irrelevant for ezmlm performance. Greetz, Peter.
Re: qmail postfix
Mate Wierdl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thx for the info. What I was curious about was also how qmail scales. For example, it requires patches sometimes. Rarely. IMHO, people are way to eager to install unnecessary patches. Apparently with large mailinglists the bigtodo patch is needed. big-concurrency, perhaps. big-todo is usually only necessary on systems that handle *lots* of messages. Or it apparently needs the dns patch. No. I've never needed it, and if you're using dnscache, it's completely unnecessary. In other words, qmail does not seem be uptodate as new requirements come up. I have a nagging feeling that Dan will not deal with qmail anymore, and perhaps he will concentrate on im2000 instead---or leaves email alone. Well, there are no guarantees. Dan could get hit by a truck, as the saying goes. It seems that as far as sysadm books are concerned, qmail is already buried. For example, the new edition of the Nemeth et all book barely mentions qmail, and discusses only postfix configuration. The same with the newest ( I forgot the author; endorsed by Raymond) Linux security book. So what? How long did it take Nemeth, et al, to acknowledge Linux? Are you trying select the most popular MTA or the best MTA for the job? If the former, stick with Sendmail. If the latter, decide what's important to you, evaluate the candidates, and select the best fit. -Dave
Re: qmail postfix
Thx for the info. What I was curious about was also how qmail scales. For example, it requires patches sometimes. Apparently with large mailinglists the bigtodo patch is needed. Or it apparently needs the dns patch. In other words, qmail does not seem be uptodate as new requirements come up. I have a nagging feeling that Dan will not deal with qmail anymore, and perhaps he will concentrate on im2000 instead---or leaves email alone. It seems that as far as sysadm books are concerned, qmail is already buried. For example, the new edition of the Nemeth et all book barely mentions qmail, and discusses only postfix configuration. The same with the newest ( I forgot the author; endorsed by Raymond) Linux security book. Mate
Re: qmail postfix
Mate Wierdl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Could anybody point me to a URL where postfix and qmail are (objectively) compared? There's a bit in LWQ: http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#comparison Which includes a link to Cameron Laird's MTA comparison, which includes links to his profiles of qmail and Postfix. The table in LWQ is a little outdated. In a rigorous benchmark conducted a couple years ago, qmail beat Postfix, but both were head-and-shoulders above everything else. Securitywise, I give the edge to qmail because its compartmentalization is better, because of Dan's generally bug-free code, avoidance of the standard C library, and because qmail is much smaller. In reliability, qmail again has the edge simply because Dan's code has fewer bugs than Wietse's. Configuration is pretty much a draw. Some people like qmail's style (separate file for each setting) vs Postfix's (lots of settings in one or more files), or vice versa. Postfix is easier to drop into a Sendmail system because it handles /etc/aliases and .forward's out of the box. Postfix is truly Open Source. qmail has some innovative features like extension addresses, address wildcarding, user-managed lists, and user-managed virtual domains that Postfix doesn't. Postfix has limited extension addresses, but no wildcarding, if I remember correctly. Postfix does multiple RCPT deliveries and implements per-host concurrency limits. -Dave
