PHP Webmaster wrote
funny name you have.
> Does anyone have experience running Lyris MailEngine
> and compared its performance with qmail (tuned with
> patched)?
Lyris is fast:
I know the Platinum license for which Lyris Inc. claims that it can
deliver 100.000 mails/hour.
We have been hosting a newsletter with >300.000 subscribers. In the
first hour of delivery Lyris actually hit the 100.000 limit. These
newsletters were around 35k in size.
Why is Lyris Listserver/MailEngine fast?
1. It keeps the queue in memory. After some time it updates its FoxPro
database.
2. Our license was limited to 200 simultaneous SMTP connections, but
Lyris tries to send many emails at once through one connection.
Even though people on this list claim, the latter doesn't help
anything, our experience says that this method speeds delivery by a
factor of 2-3.
Lyris is buggy:
The listserver crashes from time to time. It seems that a receiving MTA
that unexpectedly closes the connection or does not respond anymore
blocks the corresponding Lyris socket thread - as a consequence the
whole server is blocked from sending after some time while the input
queue, which is held in memory, grows indefinitely.
Finally Lyris crashes (or on Win-NT the whole server freezes), leaving
the FoxPro-Database in an undefined status - you have to run a so called
"dbupgrade" on the FoxPro after that which takes some hours on big
systems. As a consequence you have many and long downtimes and a lot of
manual operation with Lyris.
There seem to be several other reasons to let Lyris crash...
FoxPro doesn't have garbage collection. Depending on your server's load,
you regularly have to stop the listserver and defragment the database.
On our systems we did this every night with a custom script (Lyris Inc.
does not provide any tools for this, AFAIK). Without crashes we've had
a total of ~5hrs downtime every week and listserver.
With many lists on one server, Lyris sometimes trashes its own database
tables by overwriting one row with data of another.
Lyris Listserver is insecure:
I reported a bug many months ago to Lyris Inc.: Anyone was able to
retrieve a listowner's data including his password. But nothing have
been fixed for months. Maybe it finally was fixed in the recent version
4.2 - but I don't care anymore. ;-)
Our systems:
Lyris Listserver Platinum blah-blah,
Windows NT 4.0
Pentium II/III ~500Mhz, 512MB RAM / 2-3 9G SCSI Drives as Soft-Raid1
We also tried the Linux version when it was officially released, but
this was an absolute disaster.
And we tried the first released beta of LyrisSQL Listserver - this was
disaster number two.
> Lyris (http://www.lyris.com/products/mailengine/)
> claims that they can easily send 150,000 or more
> unique messages per hour. The best I can get out of my
> qmail box was 50,000 (w/ big-concurrency patch).
Try to spread the load onto many sending engines.
> I have heard that writing a script to use qmail-remote
> directly and only use qmail-send when the initial
> delivery fails can work wonders. (can anyone share
> code?) But is it enough to beat Lyris?
I'm not sure if this helps anything.
--
Bernhard Graf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
