Re: sendmail is slow for mass mail
On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 07:11:06AM -0400, Chris Wagner wrote:
> So, what happened to sendmail? How did it earn it's fall from grace?
> When I got into it, sendmail was it. I've never looked closely at the
> mail system since.
* it's slow.
* it doesn't scale well.
if you've ever seen sendmail boxes repeatedly crash under the load
of processing bounces from a 30,000+ subscriber mailing list you'll
understand what this means. by way of contrast, the same mailing list
on the same machine but with postfix as the MTA ran perfectly fine (no
crashes, no problems, and all the mail *delivered* in a fraction of the
time sendmail took) and it even scaled up to 450,000+ subscribers over
the next 6 months or so before we had to switch the MLM from smartlist
to listar.
smartlist also doesn't scale very gracefully...but that's another issue.
* it suffers from security-flaw-of-the-month-itis.
sendmail was not designed with security in mind (the net was a much
nicer place back then), and it shows.
* it's configuration language is overly complex for the task at hand
(the m4 macros helped a lot, but it's still way more complex than it
needs to be)
* postfix is a nearly drop-in replacement for it which doesn't suffer
from any of the above problems.
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
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