Storing incoming work dir on ramdisk

[David Lee]

On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

> Julian,
>    Sendmail has *always* been the performance pig and bottleneck
> on my mail-server.  While MailScanner 4.x is great, the performance
> of MS 3.x was sufficiently fast to outrun sendmail on my system
> (a dual-CPU Sun E220R), always.

Interesting.  Poor old sendmail always seems to have blame heaped upon it.
So I'm going to try to defend it (just a little at least).

With MS 3.x we (university with 100,000 messages/day) found MS (and its
environment), not sendmail, to be the bottleneck.  This may have been
because we did ORDB checks from MS, and the apparent MS slowness was
actually DNS/ORDB latency.

Certainly the migration to MS 4.x, with its ability for multiple, parallel
MS processes has helped matters enormously.


For our site MS 4.x/sendmail-8.11 on Sun Ultra-10/Solaris-8 copes
adequately.  The critical difference was upgrading MS from 3.x to 4.x.
(But we are now moving to new dual-Intel Redhat, which seems even more
comfortable.  Still sendmail!)

--

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