Homebrew list performance?

[Joe Mahan]

I am using an existing perl script to generate messages, and send them
(from the script), basically one at a time. Performance is slow, (a
basic qmail installation performs not better than sendmail) although I
have not yet done any tweaking at all.

Question:

    Is it neccessary to use a "qmail format" mailing list to take
advantage of concurrency? If so, I'll have to modify the perl script.
I'd just like to know before I go twiddling all the knobs on qmail.

Thanks,
Joe