On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 16:31, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Zitat von Ow Mun Heng <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > Hi all, > > > > I'm curious on why I'm seeing more references to postfix (both here and > > on googling) when setting up an email server (scalable/high > > performance/etc). > > > > Michael Nguyen actually states that > > "Postfix + LDAP just was plain faster under stress than Qmail + LDAP and > > Sendmail + LDAP" > > > > I've read in another google find that postfix is at least 3x faster than > > sendmail. > > > > I'm just wondering why that is. > > General note on this : Dependant on the special configuration you are testing > anyone of the MTAs can be the fastest. What seams to be the common baseline : > - Postfix is designed to avoid sync writes as much as possible, so if your I/O > system is the bottleneck (as most of the time is) Postfix should be the > fastest.
IO is always an issue. Esp when the target is either a 7200/10K rpm SATA drive. > - Qmail has some drawback by the "one message per recipient" design if your > bandwidth is limited and you relay many multi-recipient mails. Then this is a definate 'won't bother to look' criteria for me already. This, by design, (and I've not read much about it) is already something which I feel is stupid. > - A careful sendmail/milter setup with a strong machine can be faster then > Qmail/Postfix with traditional store/forward content filter. I'm running sendmail 8.13+clamav-milter+spamass-milter and during the mornings when I fetchmail from my sever, to be fed to my local MTA, The load is quite high. Most likely due to the milters. I don't get the store/forward content filter meaning. > - Qmail and Postfix are considered more secure than Sendmail. Ditto. but being considered does not necessary mean it is. > - Postfix and Sendmail are more flexibel in adjusting to your sepcial setup. I like sendmail maybe because I know of it's Features. I esp like sendmail after I found the "FALLBACK_MX" feature. (sendmail will try to lookup and send direct via recipient MX 1st, if it fails, then it goes to the fallback_mx which is most likely the ISP relay) Does postfix support this? > > Your setup (speed of DNS, lookup maps etc.) have more influence than the > difference beetween the MTAs. > > > > > Can anyone shed some light? > > To find the definitive answer for your setup you have to test yourself. Unfortunately, I don't have too many machines which I can play with. I currently have 1. Laptop (1.4G centrino/512MB ram) 2. P166 MMX laptop (72M ram) 3. P133 Desktop (128MB Ram) > > > > > Also, I've heard that sendmail does not support maildir format natively, > > but I've also heard that one can use procmail to deliver it into maildir > > format. > > No Sendmail guru here, but if you use procmail you have lost on the > performance > comparsion ;-) Fedora/redhat by default uses procmail as it's default lmtp. what do you use then? Is Cyrus considered a LMTP or..? -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on D600 1.4Ghz CPU kernel 2.6.9-gentoo-r1 Neuromancer 17:20:41 up 5:23, 7 users, load average: 0.52, 0.69, 0.53 --- Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
