According to Hotdog:
>
> "qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer
> agent. It is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail
> system on typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts", yeah,yeah....but in
> my feeling, it is not so fast at all.(I have use qmail for nearly 1
> year!)
>
>
> And following is the data of my test:
>
> Server MTA OS Time spend(1000 letters) Server
>Hardware Server status
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 202.96.237.177 Qmail1.03 FreeBSD3.3 314 seconds K62 350,64MRam
>4G IDE little load
> 202.96.210.242 Sendmail8.10 FreeBSD3.2 202 seconds PII450*2,1GRam
>36G SCSI little load
> 202.101.18.155 Qmail1.03 FreeBSD3.2 555 seconds
>PII450*2,512MRam,36G SCSI heavy load
> 202.101.18.157 Qmail1.03 FreeBSD3.2 404 seconds
>PII450*2,512MRam,36G SCSI No any load
>
> (Average value of 3 tests.)
>
> All letters was sent to MTA by port 25,and to a local address.
>
> The data show:
> 1. Qmail is more slow than sendmail;
> 2. Qmail can run more fast in some worm-eaten computer. (Impossible? but it is
>really!)
>
> WHY ? WHY ?
We did some similar benchmarks on Qmail 1.03 (with and without LDAP,
with and without MAILDIR) and Sendmail 8.x (with mail.local) a few
weeks ago, all running on similarly configured SPARC Ultra 2's (2 x 300MHZ /
512MB / dual SCSI).
We used the postfix smtp-source.c and the Netscape MailBench tools to
measure, record, and plot the performance.
We too saw the same slower 'drain' rates on the inbound SMTP message traffic
associated with QMAIL. However some observations from our test:
0) QMAIL and SENDMAIL performed equally well at small msgs rates.
1) SENDMAIL was much faster at delivering mail into a users mailbox at moderate
msgs rate (2 x 4 times).
2) At high msg rates (msg/sec), the load on the SENDMAIL machine was very
high (load average routinely at above 90+). This of course put the
machine to it's knees. It stopped accepting inbound traffic. We had
the load control features on sendmail disabled (QueueLA and RefuseLA
options and Sendmail was configured to do synchronous delivery).
3) We never were able to get QMAIL-SMTPD to stop accepting inbound SMTP traffic.
Because of the asynchronous nature of the local delivery with QMAIL,
it did take much longer for QMAIL to finish delivering all of the
messages (at high msg rates) to the local user, but the load on the
machine never got high enough to cause any problems (peaked at 16 on
one occasion).
IMHO, QMAIL behaved more appropriately in environments where inbound
traffic loads cannot be anticipated (e.g. ISPs around 7:00pm local time
:-), QMAIL just kept accepting email.
--curtis
