"Luke Blanshard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>1. How much hardware? Initially we want enough capacity to deliver a
>million mails a day. We plan to use a series of Linux boxes, and multiplex
>the messages across them. How many will we need, and how powerful?
A million a day is just shy of 12/second, which isn't that staggering
a load. I often hit 20/second on my list server, an old 2-cpu
Alphaserver 2100 that's also ORNL's news server. Modern PC hardware
(300 MHz+) with good SCSI disks for the queue and dedicated to sending
mail should have no problem with that. Two such boxes would probably
be overkill, but it'd be nice to have a spare (or get the messages out
twice as fast).
>2. Is qmail the right choice, or should we use Postfix?
Either would probably do the job, but I'm partial to qmail.
>My impression is
>that qmail's VERPs will let us handle the inevitable flood of bounces more
>effectively,
VERP's will be a big win.
>but that Postfix is more efficient.
Given that each of your messages is unique, I'm not sure Postfix would
be more efficient. Also, a comprehensive MTA benchmark (see
http://www.kyoto.wide.ad.jp/mta/eval1/ *) shows that qmail generally
has the edge in performance over Postfix.
-Dave
* Yes, it's in Japanese, but the results graphs are in English.
