On Wed, 31 Jan 2001 10:13:40 EST, chrisb@kippona.com said:
Is the number of mailboxes the key metric? What breaks sendmail + "a very big disk"? Isn't it the traffic?
The two biggest problems with very-high-volume servers and sendmail are: 1) You *really* need to use multiple queues and some sort of aging scheme, so mail backlogged for dead hosts gets out of your main queue. If a queue gets too full, Sendmail exhibits bad O(N**2) behavior in sorting/running the queue. 2) If you are serving mailboxes (as opposed to a Listserv-type machine where the mail *leaves*), what can kill you isn't the sendmail, but the local delivery program and POP/IMAP checks. You get enough bozo users who have set Eudora to check for new mail every 2 minutes, you'll get bogged down no matter HOW fast Sendmail itself is. -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech