Hi everyone,
Thank you for the great responses. Here are more
information regarding my system:
Dual P3-800
1 Gig ram
RAID 5 with 4 10k rpm disks
The messages are about 10k a piece. They are
personalized for each subscriber.
Bounces are handled via piping to php script which
interfaces with MySQL.
The sender script is a PHP/MySQL script that looks in
the database and dynamically creates content
personalized for each email sent.
Here are some updated questions:
(1) What is dnscache. Is it very important to use? Can
anyone point me toward some good resources? We are
currently am using our web hosting company's dns
(cybercon - same company used by colonize.com). Will
running dns cache mean we have to run bind on our own
servers?
(2) I heard that some large mailing lists use QMQP. I
read on qmail.org is capable of sending 1000 emails in
10 seconds over a modem. Is it really this powerful?
Could I use it to send 6 million emails per day with
one server using standard pc hardware (eg dual p3-800,
1 gig ram, raid 5)?
Thanks for all the great help!!!
PHP Webmaster
--- MarkD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 11:53:25PM -0700, PHP
> Webmaster allegedly wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > The company I am in is thinking about moving their
> > opt-in email newsletters from a third-party
> service
> > bureau to in-house.
> >
> > I was wondering what would be the minimum hardware
> > configuration and qmail setup needed to be able to
> > send 6 million emails within 24 hours as this is a
> > daily newsletter?
> >
> > On tests done on a dual p3-800 with 1 gigabyte of
> ram
> > running qmail configured according to Life With
> Qmail,
> > I am able to send about 1080 emails per minute, or
> > maximum 1.5 million emails per day.
>
> That's pretty consistent with what others see for a
> single system, no
> doubt using a single disk.
>
> You haven't mentioned whether this is a single email
> with multiple
> recipients or a customized email per recipient. That
> makes a big
> difference to the answer.
>
> As others have pointed out, you need to make sure
> you have:
>
> o plenty of bandwidth - have you calculated what
> sort of bit rate
> you'll need to deliver 6million * XKbyte emails
> per day? A 10K email
> constitutes a bit rate of close to 6MB/s. At that
> rate you'll want
> at least 12MB/s of bandwidth.
>
> o Plenty of disk spindle - I would spread the
> delivery across multiple
> machines, each with their very own fast
> /var/qmail. How much
> recovery time do you have if the machine goes
> down?
>
> o Good dns caching - you're going to be doing a lot
> of DNS lookups, is
> your current cache setup up to it? Are you running
> your own cache?
> You'll want to.
>
> > perform at 1080 emails per minute when the
> > concurrencyremote was set at 100, increasing to
> 118
> > had apparently no effect on the number of emails
> sent
> > per minute.
>
> Which is your system telling you there is some other
> bottleneck. What
> performance measurements did you make during this
> test? What did you
> discover about your disk, CP, bandwidth, memory and
> DNS?
>
> > Can anyone kindly provide me with insight on how
> to
> > best configure qmail to handle 6 million emails
> per
> > day? Is this possible on a single server setup and
> if
> > so how?
>
> Assuming you mean a single server in the sense that
> most do now, an
> Intel box with a disk or two, then I'd be very
> surprised if a single
> server could do it. If you mean a fire-breathiong
> monster the size of
> a fridge with a dozen high speed disks and a $100K
> price tag, then
> sure.
>
> Remember that you need to have plenty of spare
> capacity to recover
> from the inevitible down times. A system that
> delivers in 23 hours is
> way too vulnerable to some sort of downtime pushing
> your delivery
> schedule out past your deadline. A good rule of
> thumb is to use no
> more than 50% of your resources on a normal day -
> that includes time!
>
> Also remember that you will get a substantial number
> of bounces with
> this sized list. You'll need plenty of horse-power
> to manage the
> bounces and probe management. You will be using VERP
> style envelope
> addresses to track bounces of course.
>
>
> Regards.
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