Luis, et al -- ...and then Luis Lebron said... % % One of the things I have suggested to the customer is offloading some of the % work to a different server. For example, he wants to email a weekly message ... % Does this sound like a good idea?
If you can afford more servers, it's almost always good :-) In addition, if you're going to be sending high volumes of mail, it's very probably a good idea. I recently coded up some parts of a marketing/fan site for promoting music groups, video games, and such (surf over to killswitcharmy.com and/or didofans.com if you're interested). One thing we do is send template-driven personalized (== one message per person) bulk mail to our members. With some casual tuning, I managed to get this quad-Xeon box with 1G RAM and hw-mirrored SCSI drives down to about 120ms per message injection, or 30K/hr, but then they have to get off of the box. We're currently seeing a bottleneck in the mail queue as messages try to get to other machines, have to wait to retry, and so on -- and it blocks "normal" mail like our admin messages and the verification emails for new subscribers. Since we're at the mercy of the world's connectivity, it doesn't matter whether we queue up a batch in the middle of the night or any other time; even though 80% of our emails will make it out within a couple of hours at most, on a 55K mailing that leaves 11K still hanging around having to be retried (often repeatedly), and it takes a while to get through those to send out a fresh email. We're currently playing with setting up two separate queues so that all of the bulk mail (both initial and retries) is handled separately, and at low priority, while the rest of the mail is handled by the normal queue (which will also get some hi-perf tuning), but that still leaves bounces to be handled in the normal incoming stream (fortunately we can process things very fast, even if the rest of the world can't, so that's not so terribly bad). It would be easier to just have a bulk mail machine to handle all of that traffic and then the normal machine could handle subscriptions and admin messages with ease, but the client won't pay an additional monthly fee for a separate mail box. % % thanks, % % Luis HTH & HAND & keep us posted :-) :-D -- David T-G * There is too much animal courage in (play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * society and not sufficient moral courage. (work) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health" http://justpickone.org/davidtg/ Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!
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